[Liberation News Service]: LNS POST COUP II SUPPLEMENT (12/5/04)

[richard power]

Yes, the clock is running out…But it is important to
finish this fight whatever the consequences, whatever
the cost, and to understand what has happened…and then
to carry on in new ways...

Here is more damning evidence of the theft of a second
consecutive US Presidential Election, the shameless
complicity of the US regimestream news media, the
cowardice, capitulation and craven self-interest of
the Democratic Party "leadership” & a further glimpse
into the deepening disaster that is the Bush
Abomination’s national insecurity policy…

Please review them and share them with others…

Please support www.moveon.org, www.blackboxvoting.org,
www.buzzflash.com, www.truthout.org and
www.democrats.com. Please do not support the
Democratic Party – until they join the resistance, and
are willing to risk it all.

Please let Rep. Conyers and Rev. Jackson know how
grateful you are for their courageous and, sadly,
lonely leadership.

William Rivers Pitt: Democratic Representative John
Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, ranking Minority member of
the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on
Wednesday 08 December 2004 to investigate allegations
of vote fraud and irregularities in Ohio during the
2004 Presidential election. The hearing is slated to
begin at 10:00 a.m. EST in the Rayburn House Office
Building in Washington DC. 
    Democratic Representatives Melvin Watt and Robert
Scott will also be centrally involved with the
hearing. Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in attendance,
along with Ralph Neas (President, People for the
American Way), Jon Greenbaum (Director, Voting Rights
Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under
Law), Ellie Smeal (Executive Director, The Feminist
Majority), Bob Fitrakis ( The Free Press), Cliff
Arnebeck (Arnebeck Associates), John Bonifaz (General
Counsel, National Voting Institute), Steve Rosenfeld
(Producer, Air America Radio), and Shawnta Walcott
(Communications Director, Zogby International). Ohio
Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been
invited to attend. 
    The term ‘hearing’ is technically not accurate in
this matter, as Conyers and his fellow Representatives
will be holding this forum without the blessing of the
Republican Majority leader of the Judiciary Committee.
Staffers from the Minority office at the Judiciary
Committee describe the event as a ‘Members Briefing.’
That having been said, this event will be a hearing by
every meaningful definition of the word. Expert
testimony will be offered, and a good deal of data on
potential fraud previously unreported to the public
will be discussed and examined at length. 

Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: George W. Bush’s
political allies appear to be slow-rolling a requested
recount in Ohio, leaving so little time that even if
widespread voting fraud is discovered, the finding
will come too late to derail Bush’s second term.
Though balloting occurred on Nov. 2, more than a month
ago, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell still hasn’t certified an official vote, a
move now expected on Monday, Dec. 6. Since Blackwell
also has battled requests from third-party candidates
for an expedited recount, a review of Ohio’s vote now
won’t begin until Dec. 13, at the earliest, according
to Blackwell’s office. [See Boston Globe, Dec. 1,
2004] 
But the Dec. 13 date is the same day the electors of
the Electoral College meet to formally select the
President of the United States. So even if the recount
uncovers enough fraud to reveal John Kerry as the
rightful winner in Ohio, it would be too late to
change that outcome.
Meanwhile, as Ohio’s official foot-dragging has gone
on, Bush’s election-night lead has continued to shrink
with the counting of overseas and provisional ballots.
The Associated Press reported on Dec. 3 that its vote
tally of Ohio’s 88 counties showed Kerry narrowing
Bush’s lead to 119,000 votes from about 136,000 votes,
leaving Bush with a 2 percent lead.
But Kerry also might stand to gain a substantial
number of votes from a recount that would examine
ballots thrown out by antiquated punch-card voting
machines. They are  used mostly in poor areas,
especially African-American neighborhoods that are
Democratic strongholds. Other voters, believing that
Ohio’s electronic systems were susceptible to vote
rigging, have sought audits to check for tampering… 
Placing national unity as a priority over democracy,
the U.S. news media stepped in after Election 2000 to
sweep away any lingering doubts about Bush’s
legitimacy. The unity message was that the United
States needed to put the contentious election in the
past, even though Bush was the first popular-vote
loser in more than a century to move into the White
House.
This protection of Bush’s fragile legitimacy gained
even greater momentum after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks. The “united-we-stand” sentiment put the New
York Times and other leading news organizations in a
particular quandary in November 2001 when they
completed an unofficial recount of Florida’s votes.
The recount discovered that if all legally cast votes
had been counted, Al Gore would have won Florida
regardless of what standard of “chad” was used. In
other words, Gore was the rightfully elected President
of the United States, not Bush.
To avert the predictable conservative outrage over the
recount findings, the major national news outlets
simply buried the “Gore-won” lead. Instead, they
topped their stories with a bogus analysis that a
recount would have left Bush as the rightful winner.
The analysis assumed, falsely, that so-called
“overvotes,” where voters checked a candidate and
wrote in the name, would not have been included in the
recount. But the news organizations were erroneous in
this assumption because the judge handling the Florida
recount had ordered those votes tallied and almost
certainly would have added them to the state’s total,
since they were clearly legal under Florida law. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White
House.”]
Now, with Team Bush running out the clock in Ohio, one
has to wonder what contortions the mainstream news
media would put itself through if a belated recount –
after Bush’s election is formalized – shows that Kerry
should have won Ohio and thus the White House.

Ray McGovern, www.truthout.org: With the mainstream
media co-opted, and four-year older but familiar
national security faces in place for the president's
second term, it is a safe bet we are in for the same
inept, misguided policies - only more so. Sadly,
Secretary of State Colin Powell's relatively moderate
views had little visible impact on policy decisions.
Still, when he is gone the president's circle of
advisers will have an even shorter diameter. And it is
highly unlikely that Powell's designated successor,
Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will be any more astute than in
the past in seeking counsel from experienced statesmen
like her former patron, Gen. Scowcroft.
  Foreign leaders are aghast...and have been for
years. In August 2002, British senior Labor
backbencher Gerald Kaufman, a former shadow foreign
secretary, warned that the "hawks" in the U.S.
administration were giving the president poor advice:
"Bush, himself the most intellectually backward
American president in my lifetime, is surrounded by
advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their
political, military and diplomatic illiteracy. Pity
the man who relies on Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice for
counsel."
  On the afternoon of February 5, 2003, after
Secretary of State Colin Powell made his
embarrassingly memorable speech at the UN, my
colleagues and I of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS) drafted and sent a short memorandum
to the president, which concluded with this
observation:
 "After watching Secretary Powell today, we are
convinced that you would be well served if you widened
the discussion beyond... the circle of those advisers
clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling
reason and from which we believe the unintended
consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
Instead, the circle has been squeezed still tighter -
as with wagons. And those widely known in Washington
as "the crazies" when they were middle-level officials
and the president's father was in the White House are
now even more firmly ensconced. They remain in charge
of things like war - the very same folks who brought
us the "cakewalk" that became war in Iraq. 
Hold onto your hats!
www.mediamatters.org: In an editorial on December 2
titled "Red Double-Crossed Again," The Wall Street
Journal grossly distorted the content of an
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report
on the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Later that day on FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor,
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld admitted he
had "not had a chance to read" the ICRC report, but he
apparently relied on the Journal as he echoed the
editorial's distortions in an interview with host Bill
O'Reilly.
A November 30 New York Times article first revealed
the content of a confidential ICRC report, given to
the Bush administration in July, that was critical of
the treatment of so-called "unlawful enemy combatants"
held at Guantanamo. While the Journal editorial did
not mention the Times article directly, the Times was
the first to report on the ICRC's July memo, and the
editorial adopted some language from the Times
article, distorting its meaning in the process.
The Journal editorial claimed without support that
since the portions of the report were apparently
leaked to the news media, the ICRC has "has thrown
confidentiality aside," violating its longstanding
tradition of "strict confidentiality agreements with
cooperating governments." In fact, the Times did not
disclose how it obtained the information; the article
noted only that the ICRC report was "distributed to
lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and State
Department and to the commander of the detention
facility at Guantánamo," any of whom could have been
the source of the leak. The Journal insisted that "it
matters little that the original leaker in this case
might have been in the U.S. government," falsely
claiming that "[o]fficials at ICRC headquarters were
only too happy to confirm the document's
authenticity." In fact, the ICRC merely released a
statement asserting that "problems regarding
conditions and treatment at Guantánamo Bay have not
yet been adequately addressed." Rather than serving as
"confirm[ation of] the document's authenticity," the
statement could well have been a response to the Bush
administration's repeatedly invoking ICRC visits to
Guantánamo as proof that abuses have not occurred
there. 
www.fair.org: In March 2000, FAIR and international
news organizations revealed that CNN had allowed
military propaganda specialists from an Army PSYOPS
unit to work as interns in the news division of its
Atlanta headquarters. 
As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS
officers were eager to find ways to use media power to
their advantage. One officer explained at a PSYOPS
conference that the military needed to find ways to
"gain control" over commercial news satellites to help
bring down an "informational cone of silence" over
regions where special operations were taking place. 
And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an
Army officer and published by the U.S. Naval War
College ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using
the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military
commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast
resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of
"communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate,
boosting friendly morale, executing more effective
psychological operations, playing a major role in
deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence
collection." 
Of course, the full extent of these programs is not
yet known. But the fact that the U.S. government is
intentionally lying to journalists, and by extension
to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the
L.A. Times report is generating little mainstream
media attention. CNN's Aaron Brown reported the story
(12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are particularly
comfortable when we're talking about things, about
ourselves if you will." 
Brown also made another, even more revealing comment: 
"There is an important and explicit bargain between
the press and the Pentagon in a time of war. We don't
do anything to endanger the troops or operations. They
don't lie to us. Each is essential in a free society
and each is made more complicated by the information
age, but it seems that sometimes in an effort to
mislead the enemy the military has come close, very
close, to crossing the line and misleading you." 
Of course, in this case the military did not come
"very close" to misleading the public; they did
mislead the public. And while Brown may have
confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the
press and the military, it would appear that the
Pentagon does not agree. If journalists were more
willing to accept the old adage that "all governments
lie," we might all be better served. 
Norman Solomon, www.yubanet.com: Absent from daily
news coverage is remorse.
So, the major media outlets of the United States are
entering this winter in a resolute state of
"disremorse" -- about 180 degrees from any sense of
national apology or expressed regret. In the aftermath
of a 51 percent victory for the Rove-Cheney-Bush
regime on Election Day, the breast-beating and
halo-preening exercises have intensified. And while a
cast of characters -- Ashcroft, Powell, Ridge, etc. --
heads toward the exits, virtually interchangeable
players step into their roles.
With all the comings and goings, remorse is still
light-years away as top officials speak and news media
report. No need to mention people who don't have a
home; no need to focus on the children and adults with
paltry health care, or on the overall human impacts of
so much scarcity in the midst of great wealth. These
profound concerns really matter in people's lives. Yet
it's as though the reigning politicians and media have
found ways to take our minds off our minds.
The nerve-blocking anesthetics of mass media impede
the flow of feeling in unauthorized directions. Cause
and effect are disconnected, so that it seems
unavoidable and natural for children to live in
poverty across town or for U.S. troops to be killing
and dying in Iraq. Right now, it's a struggle to
disrupt the numbing media chatter about
miscalculations and mistakes -- to insist on
acknowledgment of moral culpability. America's winter
of disremorse is not about nature, it's about a lack
of nurture for what remains frozen: our capacity to
innovate and cooperate sufficiently to stop the
"leaders" who destroy life in our names.

Geoff Dougherty, Chicago Tribune: A Tribune analysis
of voter records suggests that more than 5,000 dead
people remained on the rolls on Election Day in New
Mexico. The presidential election there was decided by
6,000 votes.
And New Mexico is not alone. The Tribune's review of
voter data there and in five other key
states--Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and
Minnesota--found widespread flaws in the integrity of
voter rolls.
More than 181,000 dead people were listed on the rolls
in the six swing states, despite efforts to clean up
the country's voting system after the 2000 election.
Thousands more voters were registered to vote in two
places, which could have allowed them to cast more
than one ballot.
Further, more than 90,000 voters in Ohio cast ballots
without a valid presidential choice. Either they
decided not to choose a candidate, the machine failed
to register their choice, or they mistakenly voted for
more than one candidate.
And the FBI is investigating allegations that
Republicans in Florida mounted a large-scale campaign
to tamper with ballots.

Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times:  In the Ukraine,
citizens are in the streets protesting what they
charge is a fixed election. U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about
apparent voting irregularities. The media give the
dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the United
States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go
unreported and unnoticed. 
    Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in
Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred
by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and
discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as
those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in.
Consider: 
    In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a
recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's
three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't
counted the votes and certified the election. Some
93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted;
155,000 provisional ballots are only now being
counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior
to the election haven't been counted. 
    Ohio determines the election, but the state has
not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made
intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in
charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds - like
Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 - a dual
role: secretary of state with control over voting
procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio
campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a
thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's
vote can be made. 
    Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in
place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to
cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county,
even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting
the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure
that those who went to the wrong place by mistake
could have their votes counted. The result of this
decision - why does this not surprise? - was to
disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily
Democratic Cuyahoga County. 
    Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic
machines that provided no paper record. The maker of
many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co.,
promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in
Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush
3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast…
    This country needs no more Floridas and Ohios.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We call for a
constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to
vote for all U.S. citizens and to empower Congress to
establish federal standards and nonpartisan
administration of elections. Harris and Blackwell are
insults to the people they represent, and stains upon
the president whose election they sought to ensure.
Democracy should not be for export only. 

Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis, Columbia Free Press:
The GOP's other ace was John Kerry, whose vote for the
Iraq war left him open to Rove's flip flop attacks. On
Iraq, the economy, the ecology and more, Bush has been
merely a flop. 
    Kerry's tainted Iraq votes polluted his war record
and his standing as an alternative to endless war. Yet
with stellar debate performances and a decent final
month, Kerry may have actually carried the national
vote - if there were a fair count. 
    But with ballots still being bitterly contested in
Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, Kerry conceded too soon.
His plea for "national healing" raised gales of
laughter at Fox and Rove's White House. 
    Kerry seemed to be walking away from the tens of
millions of good-hearted Democrats and democrats who
pinned their hopes on him to end the Bush nightmare. 
It was a terrible moment for grassroots organizers who
mobilized thousands of inner city and other voters for
Kerry, only to see them turned away at the polls or
their ballots shredded with every Rovian dirty trick
imaginable. In a horrific display of contempt for the
democratic process and for people of color, similar
things were done in Florida and, to varying degrees,
in every other swing state. 
    In the past weeks, it's become abundantly clear
that a fair vote count in Ohio would have given Kerry
the presidency. Having pledged to "make every vote
count," Kerry had a solemn obligation to guarantee
just that…
    By fighting tooth and nail against a fair recount,
Ken Blackwell is leading the GOP machine in admitting
it has something to hide. It is supremely illogical to
scorn "conspiracy theorists" who question the November
2 vote count while desperately stonewalling an open
accounting. 
    We are not backing down. What's at stake here is
not just a single presidential election, but the right
of all Americans to vote and to have those votes
counted in all future elections…
    The grassroots will not surrender to the Party of
Hate, Terror and Shredded Ballots. As in Ukraine, the
whole world is starting to watch. 
    This election is not over. 

Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times:  CIA officers in Iraq
were ordered to stay away from a U.S. military
interrogation facility last year because agency
officials questioned the way detainees were being
interrogated, according to a December 2003 report on a
secret special operations unit. 
    The report warning of possible abuses of Iraqi
detainees in U.S. custody was sent to commanders in
Iraq a month before the now infamous photographs of
the Abu Ghraib prison emerged early this year, the
Pentagon said Wednesday in confirming some of the
findings. 
    The report by retired Army Col. Stuart A.
Herrington - who visited Iraq in 2003 to assess U.S.
intelligence gathering operations against Iraqi
insurgents - warned that U.S. special operations
troops and CIA operatives might be abusing Iraqi
prisoners. 
    Herrington's report went up the chain of command
to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq at the time, who ordered that the possible abuses
be investigated, Pentagon officials said. 

George Bennett, Palm Beach Post:  A group conducting a
"fraud audit" of the 2004 election sued Palm Beach
County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore on Tuesday,
accusing her of stonewalling requests for public
records related to the Nov. 2 voting.
A dozen other Florida counties could face similar
lawsuits, said Bev Harris, executive director of Black
Box Voting Inc.
The Seattle-area activist is in Orlando this week
attending a conference of Florida elections chiefs.
Harris became a celebrity among electronic-voting
critics last year when she publicized the existence of
an unsecured Web site that contained proprietary
source code and other internal documents for Diebold
touch-screen voting machines.
Black Box Voting wants to examine internal audit logs
and other records from voting machines and tabulating
machines in each of Florida's 67 counties. The group
also wants copies of correspondence and e-mails
between elections offices and voting equipment vendors
between Oct. 12 and Nov. 3.

James Ridgeway, The Village Voice: Among the
unanswered questions of 9-11 is the part played by the
FBI in handling the various tips and information
pouring through its translation section at the
Washington, D.C., field office. It is in this division
that certified language specialists with top secret
security clearances handle the most sensitive
information, from wiretaps to face-to-face interview
translations between an investigating agent and a
suspect. The translators often have inordinate power.
Because of their expertise (or rather, the limited
number of languages spoken by their bosses),
translators often make the decisions on which cases to
fully translate and which not to bother with. Errors
can creep in: Translators may misunderstand a dialect
and thus lose the meaning or context of information.
On occasion, some translators' grasp of English is so
poor that they cannot convey nuances of the speakers. 
    This division is already under fire from the
Justice Department's inspector general and
whistle-blowers, most notably Sibel Edmonds, who was
fired from her job as a Farsi translator when she
protested the way the work was being handled. Since
Edmonds began speaking out, others have come forward…
    Edmonds, whose previous letters to the two
senators were marked "classified" by John Ashcroft's
Justice Department, purportedly in the interests of
national security, is readying a federal court appeal
to the gag order. She complained to her superiors that
translators were unable to handle the languages in
which they had been certified. For example, in one
case, a man did not have proficiency in basic English,
but was hired under pressure from family members who
also had worked for the FBI. This man, according to
Edmonds, not only was "placed in sole charge of
translating for some of the most important/sensitive
intelligence investigations, he was also sent to
Guantánamo Bay to translate information collected from
the detainees." 
    Meanwhile, other cases are turning up. One of them
involves efforts by a longtime FBI counterintelligence
agent to alert his superiors to special treatment
accorded translators. John M. Cole, an FBI
counterintelligence program officer with 18 years of
experience, wrote Director Robert Mueller, in a letter
dated March 17, 2003, "I have prepared several risk
assessments concerning applicants for language
specialists positions. In the majority of these risk
assessments I found numerous areas where the
backgrounds of these individuals had not been
thoroughly investigated. In one case, I discovered
that the applicant's father was a former military
attaché who had been assigned to a foreign embassy in
Washington, D.C. Despite my findings, these
individuals were hired, given unescorted access and
Top Secret security clearances." The applicant's
father was a military attaché at the Pakistani
embassy. According to Cole, it is well-known in
Washington that all the Pakistani military attachés
are in fact Pakistani intelligence officers. 

Amy Goodman interviews Jesse Jackson, DemocracyNow!:
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jackson, Democracy Now! just
went to Spain and Italy and on one of the main TV
stations called RAI in Rome, the interviewer asked
about the election and I said, “Well, really we don't
really know who won.” And his eyebrows raised very
high and he said, “Excuse me. Kerry conceded. Haven't
you heard?” Now what about this, Reverend Jackson?
What about Kerry immediately conceding? 
JESSE JACKSON: The early concession betrayed the trust
of the voters. We have a moral obligation and a legal
obligation to see that every vote counts and whether
Kerry gets the most votes or not, we must break a
precedent of fraudulent elections. For the Secretary
of the State, in fact, can be the co-chair of a
campaign and run the process -- that's like a team
owner of a baseball team being the umpire at game
seven of the World Series. You can't be a team owner
and be a referee at the same time. You can't have
Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell as chairs of the
campaign and in charge of the process. It taints the
credibility of the process at the very beginning. 
AMY GOODMAN: What about the $51 million that John
Kerry has? The largest amount of money a presidential
candidate has had after an election. He's not in the
red, he's in the black. The biggest amount of money
any presidential candidate has had in history, well
over half what George Bush has. He could use that
money for a recount. Instead -- the poor Green Party
is raising the money. 
JESSE JACKSON: You could take a couple million dollars
of that money and hire Cliff Arnebeck’s law firm and
partners and the Common Cause lawyers who are credible
and bright and able lawyers. You could you take a
couple million dollars and put a renewed light on
Ohio. That can determine not only the outcome of this
election but the future of democratic elections. We
have to go beyond this matter. We really need, which
we do not have, we need the Constitutional right to
vote for President federally protected. We do not have
the Constitutional right to vote for President. We
only have the state's right to vote. We asked 50 state
separate and unequal elections within those states,
Ohio for example, 88 counties, each running their own
scheme. We must now go to another level. Not only
should we count these votes, we need an amendment to
the Constitution. We need -- all Americans need the
Constitutional, individual right, federally protected
right to vote for the President. 
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jackson, have you talked to John
Kerry about this? 
JESSE JACKSON: I did talk with him about the election
and he first thanked us for our continued effort, but
will not take a public position, nor offer any
resources at this time, substantial resources to help
make it happen. So we are doing it on our will. 
AMY GOODMAN: So what's he doing with his $51 million? 
JESSE JACKSON: I do not know. It make think so much
that when the reason [inaudible] those that are
fighting: the Greens, the Libertarians, and those who
have found common ground. Dr. King got the Nobel Peace
Prize and Lyndon Johnson gave King a White House
reception. He said, “I thank you very much for the
reception, but all Americans need the right to vote.”
Johnson said, “Dr. King, I like you very much. You
know I do, I like you. I regard you highly. But I
can't render the right to vote unilaterally, I just
can’t. I wish could, but I can't. The bad news is that
Congress can, but won't. So you can't have the right
to vote.” So the President talked, so we went to
Selma, the common people rose up. And there again, the
common people must rise up and demand that their vote
count. So to me, this campaign in Ohio is not so much
about Kerry as it is about Fannie Lou Hamer. It’s
about Medgar Evers. It’s about Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney. It’s about the people's will to democracy. If
people can fight [inaudible] for democracy in the
Ukraine, we can do that here. 

Erik Stetson, Associated Press: A federal grand jury
on Wednesday indicted James Tobin, President Bush's
former New England campaign chairman, on four counts
related to the Republican jamming of get-out-the-vote
phone lines on Election Day 2002. 
State Democrats, who have filed a lawsuit over the
jamming, had accused Tobin in October of involvement
in the conspiracy. 

Hans Blix, Toronto Star: The results of a review of
the functioning of the U.N., conducted by a panel
appointed by the Secretary-General Kofi Annan, will
soon be on the table. That there is a need to discuss
an array of questions is not in doubt — but the fact
that the most powerful member of the organization
shows disdain for it is not exactly conducive to a
positive intergovernmental debate. 
We learned before the invasion of Iraq that in the
view of the U.S. administration, the security council
had the choice of voting with the U.S. for armed
action — or being irrelevant. A majority on the
council did not allow itself to be pushed into
supporting the action, and the invasion took place.
Many saw this as a loss of prestige for the council
and as a crisis for the U.N.. In one way it was, and
is. Institutions such as the security council are like
instruments to be played. 
If members choose not to play or are completely out of
tune, no marching music results. It is only when the
construction of the instruments is found deficient or
outmoded that repair is meaningful. 
The refusal last year of a majority of the security
council to follow the tune that the U.S. wished the
council to play can also be seen as the saving of the
council's authority and respectability. How would the
world look at the council today if it had endorsed an
armed action to eradicate weapons of mass destruction
— that did not exist and whose evidence was often
concocted, even forged? 
Today most countries and most people consider the
action launched in Iraq a grave error or worse, and
much of American public opinion — perhaps even a
majority — shares this view. Yet the new U.S.
administration seems to take victory in the
presidential election not only as support for strong
positions and actions against terrorist threats
(probably a justified interpretation), but also as
support for its decision to launch the war on Iraq and
for its disdainful attitude to the U.N.. 
It is as if the U.N. had insulted the U.S. The
Republican convention that renominated George Bush
erupted in applause when the vice-president said that
Mr. Bush would "never seek a permission slip to defend
the American people". Fine, except that Iraq was not a
threat, not a growing threat, and probably not even a
distant threat. 
We also see an intense and large-scale campaign of
vilification, depicting the U.N. as "corrupt" because
the oil-for-food programme — instituted and supervised
by the security council and its most powerful members,
including the U.S. — enabled Iraq, the buyers of Iraqi
oil and the sellers of products to Iraq, to siphon off
money and pass it on illegally to Saddam Hussein's
regime. 
The security council remains potentially a vital
institution. The Iraq war has demonstrated the
handicap that followed from not acting with its
authorization…
For greater legitimacy, the security council needs to
represent a large part of the world's population,
hence a need for the presence in the council of the
most populous countries in all continents. One
argument, not infrequently advanced, I find totally
objectionable: that those states that pay the greatest
contributions to the U.N. budget should merit a seat.
The seats should not be for sale. 

Save the US Constitution! Save the Environment!
Restore the Sanctity of the Vote! Break the
Corporatist Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News
Media! Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up & the Iraq War
Lies! Restore the Republic!

Full texts and URLS follow.
 







http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120404W.shtml

Editor’s Note | Any who wish to see this hearing
receive wide attention should contact their Senators
and Representatives and ask that they attend.
Furthermore, any who wish to see this hearing receive
wide attention should contact the television network
C-SPAN and ask them to broadcast the event in its
entirety. C-SPAN accepts suggestions for events to be
broadcast at events at c-span.org. The network can also
be contacted via telephone at (202) 737-3220. - wrp
Also see below:      
Letter from House Committee on the Judiciary to Ohio
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell    • 

    Conyers to Hold Hearings on Ohio Vote Fraud 
    By William Rivers Pitt 
    t r u t h o u t | Report 

    Friday 03 December 2004 

    Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. of
Michigan, ranking Minority member of the House
Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on Wednesday
08 December 2004 to investigate allegations of vote
fraud and irregularities in Ohio during the 2004
Presidential election. The hearing is slated to begin
at 10:00 a.m. EST in the Rayburn House Office Building
in Washington DC. 

    Democratic Representatives Melvin Watt and Robert
Scott will also be centrally involved with the
hearing. Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in attendance,
along with Ralph Neas (President, People for the
American Way), Jon Greenbaum (Director, Voting Rights
Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under
Law), Ellie Smeal (Executive Director, The Feminist
Majority), Bob Fitrakis ( The Free Press), Cliff
Arnebeck (Arnebeck Associates), John Bonifaz (General
Counsel, National Voting Institute), Steve Rosenfeld
(Producer, Air America Radio), and Shawnta Walcott
(Communications Director, Zogby International). Ohio
Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been
invited to attend. 

    The term ‘hearing’ is technically not accurate in
this matter, as Conyers and his fellow Representatives
will be holding this forum without the blessing of the
Republican Majority leader of the Judiciary Committee.
Staffers from the Minority office at the Judiciary
Committee describe the event as a ‘Members Briefing.’
That having been said, this event will be a hearing by
every meaningful definition of the word. Expert
testimony will be offered, and a good deal of data on
potential fraud previously unreported to the public
will be discussed and examined at length. 

    The hearing came together thanks to a confluence
of events, and through the work of like-minded
individuals who are deeply concerned about the
allegations of vote fraud in the Ohio Presidential
election. Tim Carpenter and Kevin Spidel, along with
other members of Progressive Democrats of America,
went to Washington DC to speak with the Democratic
members of the Judiciary Committee about the need for
an investigation into these allegations. They found
Rep. Conyers, his fellow Judiciary Democrats, and
their staffers already working on assembling such an
investigation. 

    The core of what Conyers and his fellow Minority
members will be discussing at this hearing can be
found in the letter below, which was sent by the
Minority office to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell
on 02 December. In the letter, Conyers, along with
Reps. Watt, Nadler and Baldwin, outline a broad and
detailed series of questions and concerns about the
manner in which the Ohio election took place. 

    I will be traveling to Washington DC to begin t r
u t h o u t coverage of this event on Tuesday night,
and we will keep you posted on further developments as
they arise. 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.' 

     


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Go to Original 

One Hundred Eighth Congress 
Congress of the United States 
House of Representatives 
Committee on the Judiciary 
2138 Rayburn House Office Building 
Washington DC 20515-6216 
(202) 225-3951 

December 2, 2004 

    The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell 
    Ohio Secretary of State 
    180 East Broad Street, 16th Floor 
    Columbus, OH 43215 

    Dear Secretary Blackwell: 

    We write to request your assistance with our
ongoing investigation of election irregularities in
the 2004 Presidential election. As you may be aware,
the Government Accountability Office has agreed to
undertake a systematic and comprehensive review of
election irregularities throughout the nation. As a
separate matter, we have requested that the House
Judiciary Committee Democratic staff undertake a
thorough review of each and every specific allegation
of election irregularities received by our offices. 

    Collectively, we are concerned that these
complaints constitute a troubled portrait of a one-two
punch that may well have altered and suppressed votes,
particularly minority and Democratic votes. First, it
appears there were substantial irregularities in vote
tallies. It is unclear whether these apparent errors
were the result of machine malfunctions or fraud. 

    Second, it appears that a series of actions of
government and non-government officials may have
worked to frustrate minority voters. Consistent and 
widespread reports indicate a lack of voting machines
in urban, minority and Democratic areas, and a surplus
of such machines in Republican, white and rural areas.
As a result, minority voters were discouraged from
voting by lines that were in excess of eight hours
long. Many of these voters were also apparently
victims of a campaign of deception, where flyers and
calls would direct them to the wrong polling place.
Once at that polling place, after waiting for hours in
line, many of these voters were provided provisional
ballots after learning they were at the wrong
location. These ballots were not counted in many
jurisdictions because of a directive issued by some
election officials, such as yourself. 

    We are sure you agree with us that regardless of
the outcome of the election, it is imperative that we
examine any and all factors that may have led to
voting irregularities and any failure of votes to be
properly counted. Toward that end, we ask you to
respond to the following allegations: 

I. Counting Irregularities 
A. Warren County Lockdown – On election night, Warren
County locked down its administration building and
barred reporters from observing the counting. When
that decision was questioned, County officials claimed
they were responding to a terrorist threat that ranked
a “10" on a scale of 1 to 10, and that this
information was received from an FBI agent. Despite
repeated requests, County officials have declined to
name that agent, however, and the FBI has stated that
they had no information about a terror threat in
Warren County. Your office has stated that it does not
know of any other county that took these drastic
measures. 

    In addition to these contradictions, Warren County
officials have given conflicting accounts of when the
decision was made to lock down the building. While the
County Commissioner has stated that the decision to
lockdown the building was made during an October 28
closed-door meeting, emailed memos – dated October 25
and 26 – indicate that preparations for the lockdown
were already underway. 

    This lockdown must be viewed in the context of the
aberrational results in Warren County. In the 2000
Presidential election, the Democratic Presidential
candidate, Al Gore, stopped running television
commercials and pulled resources out of Ohio weeks
before the election. He won 28% of the vote in Warren
County. In 2004, the Democratic Presidential
candidate, John Kerry, fiercely contested Ohio and
independent groups put considerable resources into
getting out the Democratic vote. Moreover, unlike in
2000, independent candidate Ralph Nader was not on the
Ohio ballot in 2004. Yet, the tallies reflect John
Kerry receiving exactly the same percentage in Warren
County as Gore received, 28%. 

    We hope you agree that transparent election
procedures are vital to public confidence in electoral
results. Moreover, such aberrant procedures only
create suspicion and doubt that the counting of votes
was manipulated. As part of your decision to certify
the election, we hope you have investigated these
concerns and found them without merit. To assist us in
reaching a similar conclusion, we ask the following: 

    1. Have you, in fact, conducted an investigation
of the lockdown? What procedures have you or would you
recommend be put into place to avoid a recurrence of
this situation? 

    2. Have you ascertained whether County officials
were advised of terrorist activity by an FBI agent
and, if so, the identity of that agent? 

    3. If County officials were not advised of
terrorist activity by an FBI agent, have you inquired
as to why they misrepresented this fact? If the
lockdown was not as a response to a terrorist threat,
why did it take place? Did any manipulation of vote
tallies occur? 

B. Perry County Election Counting Discrepancies – The
House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has
received information indicating discrepancies in vote
tabulations in Perry County. For example, the sign-in
book for the Reading S precinct indicates that
approximately 360 voters cast ballots in that
precinct. In the same precinct, the sign-in book
indicates that there were 33 absentee votes cast. In
sum, this would appear to mean that fewer than 400
total votes were cast in that precinct. Yet, the
precinct’s official tallies indicate that 489 votes
were cast. In addition, some voters’ names have two
ballot stub numbers listed next to their entries
creating the appearance that voters were allowed to
cast more than one ballot. 

    In another precinct, W Lexington G AB, 350 voters
are registered according to the County’s initial
tallies. Yet, 434 voters cast ballots. As the tallies
indicate, this would be an impossible 124% voter
turnout. The breakdown on election night was initially
reported to be 174 votes for Bush, and 246 votes for
Kerry. We are advised that the Perry County Board of
Elections has since issued a correction claiming that,
due to a computer error, some votes were counted
twice. We are advised that the new tallies state that
only 224 people voted, and the tally is 90 votes for
Bush and 127 votes for Kerry. This would make it
appear that virtually every ballot was counted twice,
which seems improbable. 

    In Monroe Township, Precinct AAV, we are advised
that 266 voters signed in to vote on election day, yet
the Perry County Board of Elections is reporting that
393 votes were cast in that precinct, a difference of
133 votes. 

    4. Why does it appear that there are more votes
than voters in the Reading S precinct of Perry County?


    5. What is the explanation for the fluctuating
results in the W Lexington AB precinct? 

    6. Why does it appear that there are more votes
than voters in the Monroe Township precinct AAV? 

C. Perry County Registration Peculiarities 

    In Perry County, there appears to be an
extraordinarily high level voter registration, 91%;
yet a substantial number of these voters have never
voted and have no signature on file. Of the voters
that are registered in Perry County an extraordinarily
large number of voters are listed as having registered
in 1977, a year in which there were no federal
elections. Of these an exceptional number are listed
as having registered on the exact same day: in total,
3,100 voters apparently registered in Perry County on
November 8, 1977. 

    7. Please explain why there is such a high
percentage of voters in this County who have never
voted and do not have signatures on file. Also, please
help us understand why such a high number of voters in
this County are shown as having registered on the same
day in 1977. 

D. Unusual Results in Butler County 

    In Butler County, a Democratic Candidate for State
Supreme Court, C. Ellen Connally received 59,532
votes. In contrast, the Kerry-Edwards ticket received
only 54,185 votes, 5,000 less than the State Supreme
Court candidate. Additionally, the victorious
Republican candidate for State Supreme Court received
approximately 40,000 less votes than the Bush-Cheney
ticket. Further, Connally received 10,000 or more
votes in excess of Kerry’s total number of votes in
five counties, and 5,000 more votes in excess of
Kerry’s total in ten others. 

    It must also be noted that Republican judicial
candidates were reportedly “awash in cash,” with more
than $1.4 million and were also supported by
independent expenditures by the Ohio Chamber of
Commerce. 

    While you may have found an explanation for these
bizarre results, it appears to be wildly implausible
that 5,000 voters waited in line to cast a vote for an
underfunded Democratic Supreme Court candidate and
then declined to cast a vote for the most well-funded
Democratic Presidential campaign in history. We would
appreciate an answer to the following: 

    8. Have you examined how an underfunded Democratic
State Supreme Court candidate could receive so many
more votes in Butler County than the Kerry-Edwards
ticket? If so, could you provide us with the results
of your examination? Is there any precedent in Ohio
for a downballot candidate receiving on a percentage
or absolute basis so many more votes than the
Presidential candidate of the same party in this or
any other presidential election? Please let us know if
any other County in Ohio registered such a disparity
on a percentage or absolute basis. 

E. Unusual Results in Cuyahoga County 

    Precincts in Cleveland have reported an incredibly
high number of votes for third party candidates who
have historically received only a handful of votes
from these urban areas. For example, precinct 4F in
the 4th Ward cast 290 votes for Kerry, 21 for Bush,
and 215 for Constitution Party candidate Michael
Peroutka. In 2000, the same precinct cast less than 8
votes for all third party candidates combined. 

    This pattern is found in at least 10 precincts
through throughout Cleveland in 2004, awarding
hundreds of unlikely votes to the third party
candidate. Notably, these precincts share more than a
strong Democratic history: the use of a punch card
ballot. In light of these highly unlikely results, we
would like to know the following: 

    9. Have you investigated whether the punch card
system used in Cuyahoga County led to voters
accidentally voting for third party candidates instead
of the Democratic candidate they intended? If so, what
were the results? Has a third party candidate ever
received such a high percentage of votes in these
precincts. 

    10. Have you found similar problems in other
counties? Have you found similar problems with other
voting methods? 

F. Spoiled Ballots 

    According to post election canvassing, many
ballots were cast without any valid selection for
president. For example, two precincts in Montgomery
County had an undervote rate of over 25% each –
accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line
to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for
president. This is in stark contrast to the 2% of
undervoting county-wide. Disturbingly, predominantly
Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than
those that were predominantly Republican. It is
inconceivable to us that such a large number of people
supposedly did not have a preference for president in
such a controversial and highly contested election. 

    Considering that an estimated 93,000 ballots were
spoiled across Ohio, we would like to know the
following: 

    11. How many of those spoiled ballots were of the
punch card or optical scan format and could therefore
be examined in a recount? 

    12. Of those votes that have a paper trail, how
many votes for president were undercounted, or showed
no preference for president? How many were
overcounted, or selected more than one candidate for
president? How many other ballots had an indeterminate
preference? 

    13. Of the total 93,000 spoiled ballots, how many
were from predominantly Democratic precincts? How many
were from minority-majority precincts? 

    14. Are you taking steps to ensure that there will
be a paper trail for all votes before the 2006
elections so that spoiled ballots can be individually
re-examined? 

G. Franklin County Overvote – On election day, a
computerized voting machine in ward 1B in the Gahanna
precinct of Franklin County recorded a total of 4,258
votes for President Bush and 260 votes for Democratic
challenger, John Kerry. However, there are only 800
registered voters in that Gahanna precinct, and only
638 people cast votes at the New Life Church polling
site. It was since discovered that a computer glitch
resulted in the recording of 3,893 extra votes for
President George W. Bush. 

    Fortunately, this glitch was caught and the
numbers were adjusted to show President Bush’s true
vote count at 365 votes to Senator Kerry’s 260 votes.
However, many questions remain as to whether this kind
of malfunction happened in other areas of Ohio. To
help us clarify this issue, we request that you answer
the following: 

    15. How was it discovered that this computer
glitch occurred? 

    16. What procedures were employed to alert other
counties upon the discovery of the malfunction? 

    17. Can you be absolutely certain that this
particular malfunction did not occur in other counties
in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election? How? 

    18. What is being done to ensure that this type of
malfunction does not happen again in the future? 

H. Miami County Vote Discrepancy – In Miami County,
with 100% of the precincts reporting on Wednesday,
November 3, 2004, President Bush had received 20,807
votes, or 65.80% of the vote, and Senator Kerry had
received 10,724 votes, or 33.92% of the vote. Miami
reported 31,620 voters. Inexplicably, nearly 19,000
new ballots were added after all precincts reported,
boosting President Bush’s vote count to 33,039, or
65.77%, while Senator Kerry’s vote percentage stayed
exactly the same to three one-hundredths of a
percentage point at 33.92%. 

    Roger Kearney of Rhombus Technologies, Ltd., the
reporting company responsible for vote results of
Miami County, has stated that the problem was not with
his reporting and that the additional 19,000 votes
came before 100% of the precincts were in. However,
this does not explain how the vote count could change
for President Bush, but not for Senator Kerry, after
19,000 new votes were added to the roster. To help us
better understand this anomaly, we request that you
answer the following: 

    19. What is your explanation as to the statistical
anomaly that showed virtually identical ratios after
the final 20-40% of the vote came in? In your
judgment, how could the vote count in this County have
changed for President Bush, but not for Senator Kerry,
after 19,000 new votes were added to the roster? 

    20. Are you aware of any pending investigations
into this matter? 

I. Mahoning County Machine Problems – In Mahoning
County, numerous voters reported that when they
attempted to vote for John Kerry, the vote showed up
as a vote for George Bush. This was reported by
numerous voters and continued despite numerous
attempts to correct their vote. 

    21. Please let us know if you have conducted any
investigation or inquiry of machine voting problems in
the state, including the above described problems in
Mahoning County, and the results of this investigation
or inquiry. 

    II. Procedural Irregularities 

A. Machine Shortages 

    Throughout predominately Democratic areas in Ohio
on election day, there were reports of long lines
caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines.
Evidence introduced in public hearings indicates that
68 machines in Franklin County were never deployed for
voters, despite long lines for voters at that county,
with some voters waiting from two to seven hours to
cast their vote. The Franklin County Board of
Elections reported that 68 voting machines were never
placed on election day, and Franklin County BOE
Director Matt Damschroder admitted on November 19,
2004 that 77 machines malfunctioned on Election Day.
It has come to our attention that a county purchasing
official who was on the line with Ward Moving and
Storage Company, documented only 2,741 voting machines
delivered through the November 2 election day.
However, Franklin County’s records reveal that they
had 2,866 “machines available” on election day. This
would mean that amid the two to seven hour waits in
the inner city of Columbus, at least 125 machines
remained unused on Election Day. 

    Franklin County’s machine allocation report
clearly states the number of machines that were placed
“By Close of Polls.” However, questions remain as to
where these machines were placed and who had access to
them throughout the day. Therefore, what matters is
not how many voting machines were operating at the end
of the day, but rather how many were there to service
the people during the morning and noon rush hours. 

    An analysis revealed a pattern of providing fewer
machines to the Democratic city of Columbus, and more
machines to the primarily Republican suburbs. At seven
out of eight polling places, observers counted only
three voting machines per location. According to the
presiding judge at one polling site located at the
Columbus Model Neighborhood facility at 1393 E. Broad
St., there had been five machines during the 2004
primary. Moreover, at Douglas Elementary School, there
had been four machines during the spring primary. In
one Ohio voting precinct serving students from Kenyon
College, some voters were required to wait more than
eight hours to vote. There were reportedly only two
voting machines at that precinct. The House Judiciary
Committee staff has received first hand information
confirming these reports. 

    Additionally, it appears that in a number of
locations, polling places were moved from large
locations, such as gyms, where voters could
comfortably wait inside to vote to smaller locations
where voters were required to wait in the rain. We
would appreciate answers to the following: 

    22. How much funding did Ohio receive from the
federal government for voting machines? 

    23. What criteria were used to distribute those
new machines? 

    24. Were counties given estimates or assurances as
to how many new voting machines they would receive?
How does this number compare to how many machines were
actually received? 

    25. What procedures were in place to ensure that
the voting machines were properly allocated throughout
Franklin and other counties? What changes would you
recommend be made to insure there is a more equitable
allocation of machines in the future? 

B. Invalidated Provisional Ballots 

    As you know, just weeks before the 2004
Presidential election, you issued a directive to
county election officials saying they are allowed to
count provisional ballots only from voters who go to
the correct precinct for their home address. At the
same time, it has been reported that fraudulent flyers
were being circulated on official-looking letterhead
telling voters the wrong place to vote, phone calls
were placed incorrectly informing voters that their
polling place had changed, “door-hangers” telling
African-American voters to go to the wrong precinct,
and election workers sent voters to the wrong
precinct. In other areas, precinct workers refused to
give any voter a provisional ballot. And in at least
one precinct, election judges told voters that they
may validly cast their ballot in any precinct, leading
to any number of disqualified provisional ballots. 

    In Hamilton County, officials have carried this
problematic and controversial directive to a ludicrous
extreme: they are refusing to count provisional
ballots cast at the correct polling place if they were
cast at the wrong table in that polling place. It
seems that some polling places contained multiple
precincts which were located at different tables. Now,
400 such voters in Hamilton county alone will be
disenfranchised as a result of your directive. 

    26. Have you directed Hamilton County and all
other counties not to disqualify provisional ballots
cast at the correct polling place simply because they
were cast at the wrong precinct table? 

    27. While many election workers received your
directive that voters may cast ballots only in their
own precincts, some did not. How did you inform your
workers, and the public, that their vote would not be
counted if cast in the wrong precinct? How many votes
were lost due to election workers telling voters they
may vote at any precinct, in direct violation of your
ruling? 

    28. Your directive was exploited by those who
intentionally misled voters about their correct
polling place, and multiplied the number of
provisional ballots found invalid. What steps have you
or other officials in Ohio taken to investigate these
criminal acts? Has anyone been referred for
prosecution? If so, what is the status of their cases?


    29. How many provisional ballots were filed in the
presidential election in Ohio? How many were
ultimately found to be valid and counted? What were
the various reasons that these ballots were not
counted, and how many ballots fall into each of these
categories? Please break down the foregoing by County
if possible. 

C. Directive to Reject Voter Registration Forms Not
Printed on White, Uncoated Paper of Not Less Than 80
lb Text Weight 

    On September 7, you issued a directive to county
boards of elections commanding such boards to reject
voter registration forms not “printed on white,
uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.”
Instead, the county boards were to follow a confusing
procedure where the voter registration form would be
treated as an application for a form and a new blank
form would be sent to the voter. While you reversed
this directive, you did not do so until September 28.
In the interim, a number of counties followed this
directive and rejected otherwise valid voter
registration forms. There appears to be some further
confusion about the revision of this order which
resulted in some counties being advised of the change
by the news media. 

    30. How did you notify county boards of elections
of your initial September 7 directive? 

    31. How did you notify county boards of elections
of your September 28 decision to revise that
directive? 

    32. Have you conducted an investigation to
determine how many registration forms were rejected as
a result of your September 7 directive? If so, how
many? 

    33. Have you conducted an investigation to
determine how many voters who had their otherwise
valid forms rejected as a result of your September 7
directive subsequently failed to re-register? If so,
how many? 

    34. Have you conducted an investigation to
determine how many of those voters showed up who had
their otherwise valid forms rejected to vote on
election day and were turned away? If so, how many? 

    We await your prompt reply. To the extent any
questions relate to information not available to you,
please pass on such questions to the appropriate
election board or other official. Please respond to
2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC
20515 by December 10. If you need more time to
investigate and respond to some of these inquiries, we
would welcome a partial response by that date and a
complete response within a reasonable period of time
thereafter. If you have any questions about this
inquiry, please contact Perry Apelbaum or Ted Kalo of
the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff at
(202) 225-6504. 

    Sincerely, 

    Rep. John Conyers, Jr. 
    Rep. Melvin Watt 
    Rep. Jerrold Nadler 
    Rep. Tammy Baldwin 

  -------

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/120404.html

Slow-Rolling Democracy in Ohio
By Robert Parry
December 4, 2004
 

George W. Bush’s political allies appear to be
slow-rolling a requested recount in Ohio, leaving so
little time that even if widespread voting fraud is
discovered, the finding will come too late to derail
Bush’s second term.

Though balloting occurred on Nov. 2, more than a month
ago, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell still hasn’t certified an official vote, a
move now expected on Monday, Dec. 6. Since Blackwell
also has battled requests from third-party candidates
for an expedited recount, a review of Ohio’s vote now
won’t begin until Dec. 13, at the earliest, according
to Blackwell’s office. [See Boston Globe, Dec. 1,
2004] 

But the Dec. 13 date is the same day the electors of
the Electoral College meet to formally select the
President of the United States. So even if the recount
uncovers enough fraud to reveal John Kerry as the
rightful winner in Ohio, it would be too late to
change that outcome.

Meanwhile, as Ohio’s official foot-dragging has gone
on, Bush’s election-night lead has continued to shrink
with the counting of overseas and provisional ballots.
The Associated Press reported on Dec. 3 that its vote
tally of Ohio’s 88 counties showed Kerry narrowing
Bush’s lead to 119,000 votes from about 136,000 votes,
leaving Bush with a 2 percent lead.

But Kerry also might stand to gain a substantial
number of votes from a recount that would examine
ballots thrown out by antiquated punch-card voting
machines. They are  used mostly in poor areas,
especially African-American neighborhoods that are
Democratic strongholds. Other voters, believing that
Ohio’s electronic systems were susceptible to vote
rigging, have sought audits to check for tampering.

Instead of embracing these examinations to resolve
voter doubts, however, Secretary of State Blackwell
and other Bush allies in Ohio have resisted the
demands. Now, the clock is running out for any
meaningful review. [Citizens demanding a full recount
in Ohio scheduled a rally for Dec. 4 in the capital of
Columbus Other protests are being organized in the
days leading up to the Electoral College meetings on
Dec. 13.]

Florida Echoes

In some ways, the United States is witnessing a repeat
of Election 2000 where Bush first frustrated Al Gore’s
demands for recounts in Florida and then had five
Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court block a recount
ordered by the state Supreme Court. Finally, the five
Republican justices in Washington required that a
reorganized Florida recount be conducted in two hours,
a clearly impossible task that handed the presidency
to George W. Bush. 

Placing national unity as a priority over democracy,
the U.S. news media stepped in after Election 2000 to
sweep away any lingering doubts about Bush’s
legitimacy. The unity message was that the United
States needed to put the contentious election in the
past, even though Bush was the first popular-vote
loser in more than a century to move into the White
House.

This protection of Bush’s fragile legitimacy gained
even greater momentum after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks. The “united-we-stand” sentiment put the New
York Times and other leading news organizations in a
particular quandary in November 2001 when they
completed an unofficial recount of Florida’s votes.

The recount discovered that if all legally cast votes
had been counted, Al Gore would have won Florida
regardless of what standard of “chad” was used. In
other words, Gore was the rightfully elected President
of the United States, not Bush.

To avert the predictable conservative outrage over the
recount findings, the major national news outlets
simply buried the “Gore-won” lead. Instead, they
topped their stories with a bogus analysis that a
recount would have left Bush as the rightful winner.

The analysis assumed, falsely, that so-called
“overvotes,” where voters checked a candidate and
wrote in the name, would not have been included in the
recount. But the news organizations were erroneous in
this assumption because the judge handling the Florida
recount had ordered those votes tallied and almost
certainly would have added them to the state’s total,
since they were clearly legal under Florida law. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White
House.”]

Now, with Team Bush running out the clock in Ohio, one
has to wonder what contortions the mainstream news
media would put itself through if a belated recount –
after Bush’s election is formalized – shows that Kerry
should have won Ohio and thus the White House.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and
Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It
can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also
available at Amazon.com
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120604X.shtml
All Mosquitos, No Swamp; No Elephants Either
  By Ray McGovern
  t r u t h o u t | Perspective
  Sunday 05 December 2004
  Last Thursday's conference on "Al Qaeda 2.0:
Transnational Terrorism After 9/11," sponsored by the
New America Foundation and the New York University
Center on Law & Security, was a valuable gift to those
wanting an update on informed opinion on the subject.
The event proved to be as highly instructive for what
was not addressed, though, as for the issues that
were. The elephants known to be present remained
largely unacknowledged.
  The cavernous Caucus Room of the Russell Senate
Office Building was full to the gunnels. Panel after
panel of distinguished presenters from near and far,
from right and left - including authors Peter Bergen,
Michael Scheuer, Jessica Stern and Col. Pat Lang -
exuded and freely shared their expertise. But there
was myopia as well.
  The mosquitos of terrorism were dissected and
examined as carefully as biology students once did
drosophila, but typing the generic DNA of terrorism
proved more elusive. Worse, no attention was given to
the swamp in which terrorists breed. Were it not for a
few impertinent questions from the audience evoking a
pungent smell, the swamps might have eluded attention
altogether.
  The first panel featured two experts from RAND, both
of whom touched only in passing - and quite gingerly -
on the need to drain the swamp. The first closed his
remarks with a 30-second peroration in which he
observed that less attention might be given to
kill/capture metrics in favor of addressing the causes
of terrorism and breaking the cycle of terrorist
recruitment. 
  The second speaker from RAND, referring to that
organization's numerous studies on influencing public
opinion, closed his remarks with this: "When the
message coheres with the context in which the message
is transmitted, it works." Sending out the right
message during the Cold War was easier, he said,
because the context (the United States being the only
alternative to the USSR) was very clear. On terrorism,
he added, we need to ponder "the mismatch between
context and message."
  What About The Elephants?
  Then came a rude question from the audience: Is it
not striking that even in an academic-type setting
like this, elephants must remain invisible? Is it not
ironic, that a panel of the U.S. Defense Science
Board, in an unclassified study on "Strategic
Communication," completed on September 23 but kept
under wraps until after the November 2 election, let
the pachyderms out of the bag? Directly contradicting
the president, the DSB panel gave voice to what
virtually all who were sitting in that ornate Senate
Caucus Room knew, but were afraid to say. It named the
elephants.
  "Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,' but rather, they
hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice
their objections to what they see as one-sided support
in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and
the longstanding, even increasing support for what
Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf
States. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks
about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is
seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."
  "...Nor can the most carefully crafted messages,
themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks
credibility."
  U.S. Support For Israel "Immutable"
  Another questioner pressed RAND's expert on
mismatch-context-message, asking, "What can we do to
change the context?" In answer the expert acknowledged
that the United States has a "bad reputation" but
insisted that this is "unavoidable" because, for
example, U.S. support for Israel is "immutable." The
United States is also connected to what many Muslims
consider "apostate" regimes, but it is difficult to
escape what binds us, because the U.S. needs their
"tactical support." (Read: oil; military bases;
intelligence.)
  There was some wincing and squirming in the
audience, but in the end it was left to aptly named
Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, former CIA case
officer, and author of the book Understanding Terror
Networks (published earlier this year), to state the
obvious on Israel and Iraq. Putting it even more
bluntly that the Defense Science Board panel, he
asserted:
  "We are seen as a hypocritical bully in the Middle
East and we have to stop!"
  Now why should that be so hard to say, I asked
myself. And I was reminded of a frequent, unnerving
experience I had while on the lecture circuit in
recent months. Almost invariably, someone in the
audience would approach me after the talk and ensuing
discussion, and congratulate me on my "courage" in
naming Israel as a factor in discussing the war in
Iraq and the struggle against terrorism.
  I don't get it. Since when did it take uncommon
courage to state simply, without fear or favor, the
conclusions that fall out of one's analysis? Since
when did it become an exceptional thing to tell it
like it is?
  Taking The Heat On Israel
  I thought of the debate I had on Iraq with
arch-neoconservative and former CIA Director James
Woolsey on PBS' Charlie Rose Show on August 20, when I
broke the taboo on mentioning Israel and was
immediately branded "anti-Semitic" by Woolsey.
Reflecting later on his accusation, it seemed almost
OK since it was so blatantly ad hominem. And his
attack was all the more transparent, coming from the
self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of
JINSA" - the Jewish Institute of National Security
Affairs, a strong advocate of war to eliminate all
perceived enemies of Israel - like Iraq. In the
ensuing days, a flood of e-mail reached me from all
over the country - some of it repeating Woolsey's
charge, but most of it warmly congratulating me on my
"courage."
  I still don't fully understand. And that was my
candid answer to the question I dreaded - the one that
so often came up during the Q and A sessions following
my presentations: Why is it that the state of Israel
has such pervasive influence over our body politic? No
one denied that it does; most seemed genuinely puzzled
as to why. My embarrassment at my inability to answer
the question is attenuated by the solace I take in the
thought that I am in good company.
  Gen. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to
President George H. W. Bush and now chair of his son's
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, has
been known to speak out on key issues when his
patience is exhausted. Remember how, for example,
before the attack on Iraq, he described the evidence
of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as "scant" when
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was calling it
"bulletproof?" Well, it sounds like he has again run
out of patience. Scowcroft recently told the Financial
Times that George W. Bush is "mesmerized" by Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Sharon just has him
wrapped around his little finger," Scowcroft is quoted
as saying.
  Scowcroft and I apparently have less at risk than
those working for RAND...or for the New York Times,
which gives off the aroma of being similarly
mesmerized and intimidated. This shows through with
amazing regularity; I'll adduce but two recent
examples: 
  Times Timing...
  To its credit, the New York Times on November 24
published a story by Times reporter Thom Shanker on
the findings of the Defense Science Board panel report
given to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on September 23.
But why was the story two months late? And the urban
legend that it was the Times that broke the story is
not true, even though the Washington Post's somnolent
ombudsman, Michael Getler "confirms that legend in his
column this morning. (Noting that the story "didn't
appear in the Post," Getler implies that it should
have, because "it goes to the heart of both the war on
terrorism and the war in Iraq and it raises many
crucial issues that don't get probed deeply enough by
news organizations, in my opinion.")
  It was not the Times on November 24, but rather
Reasononline's Matt Welch, who broke the story. On
November 15 Welch wrote an account of the panel's
report in which he referred to its recommendations as
having already been "made public." Were reporters from
the mainstream press again asleep? Do they feed only
on the thin gruel of approved Pentagon handouts? It is
easy to understand that the Defense Department had no
incentive to advertise the DSB panel's embarrassing
and potentially explosive findings. (How often have we
seen a Pentagon-sponsored report contradicting a
sitting president on a matter of such significance -
and before a crucial election?) It is not so easy to
grasp why the media missed or ignored the story. Or
perhaps it is.
  Maybe the clue is in the timing. I gave a long
interview on US intelligence matters to another Times
reporter a few weeks before the election and at the
conclusion of the interview I commented that I
certainly hoped his story would appear before November
2. This reporter turned out to be as candid as he was
embarrassed. No, he confessed, his superiors at the
Times had made it clear that there was an embargo on
criticism of the administration of the kind I had
offered until after the election. I expressed
amazement that the New York Times - once courageous
publisher of the Pentagon Papers that helped bring an
end to our last ill-conceived war - would allow itself
to be so intimidated. He replied, with undisguised
embarrassment, that this is simply the way it is
today. 
  Again, I find myself wondering how long the Times
sat on the material reported by Shanker. Did it have
the story before November 2? What does it mean that
the Times published Shanker's report only after a
decent post-election interval? Also interesting is the
date ultimately chosen to run it - the day before
Thanksgiving, a very poor time to attract the
attention such a story might otherwise evoke. Yet
another sign of wimpish desire to pander to
administration preferences?
  ...and Times Surgery
  Of equal interest is how the Times abridged the
story itself. Shanker did quote from the key paragraph
beginning with "Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom'"
(quoted in full above). But he or his editors
deliberately cut out the next sentence about what
Muslims do object to; i.e., U.S. "one-sided support in
favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights," and
support for tyrannical regimes. The Times did include
the sentence that immediately followed the omitted
one. In other words, the offending middle sentence was
surgically removed from the paragraph like a malignant
tumor.
  Editing Bin Laden, As Well
  Similarly creative editing showed through the Times'
reporting on Osama Bin Laden's videotaped speech in
late October. Several paragraphs of the story made it
onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key
point Bin Laden made toward the beginning of his
remarks was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the
very bottom of page nine. Buried there, dwarfed by a
large ad for Bloomingdales, was Bin Laden's revealing
claim that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after
"we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the
American-Israeli coalition against our people in
Palestine and Lebanon."
  If, as suggested earlier, one were to look for
"context," precious little is provided by the Times. A
"newspaper of record" might have noted that even the
risk-averse 9/11 commissioners pointed out on page 147
of the Commission Report that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
mastermind and executioner of the 9/11 attacks, was
motivated by "his violent disagreement with U.S.
foreign policy favoring Israel." Was that not news fit
to print?
  Four More Years
  With the mainstream media co-opted, and four-year
older but familiar national security faces in place
for the president's second term, it is a safe bet we
are in for the same inept, misguided policies - only
more so. Sadly, Secretary of State Colin Powell's
relatively moderate views had little visible impact on
policy decisions. Still, when he is gone the
president's circle of advisers will have an even
shorter diameter. And it is highly unlikely that
Powell's designated successor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice,
will be any more astute than in the past in seeking
counsel from experienced statesmen like her former
patron, Gen. Scowcroft.
  Foreign leaders are aghast...and have been for
years. In August 2002, British senior Labor
backbencher Gerald Kaufman, a former shadow foreign
secretary, warned that the "hawks" in the U.S.
administration were giving the president poor advice:
  "Bush, himself the most intellectually backward
American president in my lifetime, is surrounded by
advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their
political, military and diplomatic illiteracy. Pity
the man who relies on Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice for
counsel."
  Shrinking Circle
  On the afternoon of February 5, 2003, after
Secretary of State Colin Powell made his
embarrassingly memorable speech at the UN, my
colleagues and I of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS) drafted and sent a short memorandum
to the president, which concluded with this
observation:
  "After watching Secretary Powell today, we are
convinced that you would be well served if you widened
the discussion beyond... the circle of those advisers
clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling
reason and from which we believe the unintended
consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
  Instead, the circle has been squeezed still tighter
- as with wagons. And those widely known in Washington
as "the crazies" when they were middle-level officials
and the president's father was in the White House are
now even more firmly ensconced. They remain in charge
of things like war - the very same folks who brought
us the "cakewalk" that became war in Iraq.
  Hold onto your hats!
  -------
  Ray McGovern's duties during his 27-year career as
an analyst at the CIA included daily briefings of
then-Vice President Bush and the most senior national
security advisers to President Ronald Reagan. McGovern
is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
  An earlier version of this article appeared on
Tompaine.com.
  -------



http://mediamatters.org/items/200412030010

Back to this story | Hoe 
http://mediamatters.org/  
Wall Street Journal distorted ICRC report; Rumsfeld
followed suit
In an editorial on December 2 titled "Red
Double-Crossed Again," The Wall Street Journal grossly
distorted the content of an International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) report on the treatment of
detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Later that day on
FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor, Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld admitted he had "not had a chance
to read" the ICRC report, but he apparently relied on
the Journal as he echoed the editorial's distortions
in an interview with host Bill O'Reilly.
A November 30 New York Times article first revealed
the content of a confidential ICRC report, given to
the Bush administration in July, that was critical of
the treatment of so-called "unlawful enemy combatants"
held at Guantanamo. While the Journal editorial did
not mention the Times article directly, the Times was
the first to report on the ICRC's July memo, and the
editorial adopted some language from the Times
article, distorting its meaning in the process.
The Journal editorial claimed without support that
since the portions of the report were apparently
leaked to the news media, the ICRC has "has thrown
confidentiality aside," violating its longstanding
tradition of "strict confidentiality agreements with
cooperating governments." In fact, the Times did not
disclose how it obtained the information; the article
noted only that the ICRC report was "distributed to
lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and State
Department and to the commander of the detention
facility at Guantánamo," any of whom could have been
the source of the leak. The Journal insisted that "it
matters little that the original leaker in this case
might have been in the U.S. government," falsely
claiming that "[o]fficials at ICRC headquarters were
only too happy to confirm the document's
authenticity." In fact, the ICRC merely released a
statement asserting that "problems regarding
conditions and treatment at Guantánamo Bay have not
yet been adequately addressed." Rather than serving as
"confirm[ation of] the document's authenticity," the
statement could well have been a response to the Bush
administration's repeatedly invoking ICRC visits to
Guantánamo as proof that abuses have not occurred
there. 
>From the November 30 New York Times article:
Antonella Notari, a veteran Red Cross official and
spokeswoman, said that the organization frequently
complained to the Pentagon and other arms of the
American government when government officials cite the
Red Cross visits to suggest that there is no abuse at
Guantánamo. Most statements from the Pentagon in
response to queries about mistreatment at Guantánamo
do, in fact, include mention of the visits.
The Journal editorial also misrepresented the ICRC's
specific criticisms of U.S. conduct at Guantánamo in
order to make the group's positions appear ludicrous.
"[T]he ICRC is alleging that the psychological
conditions faced by Guantánamo detainees are
'tantamount to torture.' Why? Because -- we kid you
not -- prisoners are being held for indefinite periods
and the uncertainty is stressful," the editorial
stated.
According to the Times, the ICRC report claimed that
"the American military has intentionally used
psychological and sometimes physical coercion
'tantamount to torture' on prisoners at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba." Though the Times does indicate that the
ICRC was also concerned about the effect of indefinite
detention on the prisoners' mental health, it was the
psychological and physical coercion, and not the
indefinite detention, that the ICRC reportedly deemed
"tantamount to torture."
The Journal editorial also falsely claimed that the
ICRC is "demanding POW status for un-uniformed
combatants who target civilians." In fact, the ICRC
made clear in a 2003 report titled "The legal
situation of 'unlawful/unprivileged combatants'" that
the group acknowledges a distinction between POWs and
unlawful combatants and does not demand POW status for
detainees captured in Afghanistan. Rather, the ICRC
asserts that while these detainees may not be POWs as
defined by the Third Geneva Convention ("Geneva
Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of
War"), they still deserve more limited protections
under the Fourth Geneva Convention ("Geneva Convention
relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time
of War") and the First Additional Protocol to the
Geneva Conventions.
The Journal editorial went even further in its
misrepresentation of the ICRC's position on the legal
rights of prisoners at Guantánamo, falsely claiming
that the ICRC wants to grant them "even more
privileges than legitimate POWs." The Journal claimed
that since the Geneva Conventions allow POWs to "be
held for the duration of the conflict so that they do
not return to the battlefield," the ICRC's concern
about the mental health effects of indefinite
detention amounts to a demand for that detainees be
released before the end of the war against Al Qaeda.
In fact, the Times article indicates no such assertion
by the ICRC.
Rumsfeld echoed the Journal's false interpretation of
the ICRC report during his interview on The O'Reilly
Factor, and O'Reilly agreed. Even though Rumsfeld's
position would allow him access to the confidential
ICRC report, he offered this false interpretation just
after admitting that he hadn't read the ICRC report,
suggesting that it came from the Journal. 
>From the December 2 edition of FOX News' The O'Reilly
Factor:
O'REILLY: What do you think of the International Red
Cross condemning the way the U.S.A. is treating
prisoners in Guantánamo Bay?
RUMSFELD: I have not had a chance to read the late
missive from them.
O'REILLY: They basically say we're torturing them.
That's what they say.
RUMSFELD: Right. They say basically that holding
people for the long-term without indicating to them is
tantamount to mental torture.
O'REILLY: Right.
[...]
RUMSFELD: [T]hey've decided on their own that it is
... "tantamount to torture" to keep somebody without
telling them how long they're going to stay in jail.
— D.B.B. & G.W.
Posted to the web on Friday December 3, 2004 at 5:12
PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved. 
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http://www.fair.org/press-releases/cnn-psyops-fallujah.html
FAIR  Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting     112 W. 27th
Street   New York, NY 10001 
MEDIA ADVISORY: 
The Return of PSYOPS 
Military's media manipulation demands more
investigation 
December 3, 2004 
The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04)
that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of
executing psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS,
in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This
incident raises serious questions about government
disinformation and journalistic credibility, but
recent discussions of the government's propaganda
plans have excluded some valuable context. 
In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle
Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that
a U.S. military assault on Fallujah had begun. In
fact, the offensive would not actually begin for
another three weeks. The goal of the psychological
operation, according to the Times, was to deceive
Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in
the event of an actual offensive. 
This operation raises obvious questions about the
government's use of media to broadcast disinformation
at home and abroad-- not to mention questions about
journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question
official claims. But the CNN story has received little
pick-up so far from other news outlets-- and when it
is covered, it's treated like an isolated episode,
even though recent history shows that U.S. government
plans to deceive journalists and the public are
widespread and systematic, not aberrational. 
Shortly before the launch of the "war on terror," an
unnamed Pentagon war planner seemed to warn
journalists everywhere when he told Washington Post
reporter Howard Kurtz: "This is the most
information-intensive war you can imagine... We're
going to lie about things." (9/24/01) 
In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the
Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was
"developing plans to provide news items, possibly even
false ones, to foreign media organizations" in an
effort "to influence public sentiment and policy
makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries." 
The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon
announced that the office would be eliminated. But
considerably less media attention was paid when
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that,
while the OSI had been closed, its mission would be
taken up by other agencies. 
As Rumsfeld put it, "I went down that next day and
said 'Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine--
I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can
have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single
thing that needs to be done and I have.'" (FAIR Media
Advisory, 11/27/02) So the revelation that a
misinformation campaign bearing a striking resemblance
to the description of the OSI was actually being
carried out ought not to come as a total surprise. 
Earlier this year, another Los Angeles Times scoop
(6/3/04) revealed that one of the most enduring images
of the war-- the toppling of the statue of Saddam
Hussein in a Baghdad square on April 9, 2003-- was a
U.S. Army psychological warfare operation staged to
look like a spontaneous Iraqi action: 
"As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003,
Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad,
site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a
Marine colonel-- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was
widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to
topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a
quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that
made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking."

CNN's history of voluntary cooperation with PSYOPS
troops is also worth considering. In March 2000, FAIR
and international news organizations revealed that CNN
had allowed military propaganda specialists from an
Army PSYOPS unit to work as interns in the news
division of its Atlanta headquarters. 
As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS
officers were eager to find ways to use media power to
their advantage. One officer explained at a PSYOPS
conference that the military needed to find ways to
"gain control" over commercial news satellites to help
bring down an "informational cone of silence" over
regions where special operations were taking place. 
And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an
Army officer and published by the U.S. Naval War
College ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using
the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military
commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast
resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of
"communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate,
boosting friendly morale, executing more effective
psychological operations, playing a major role in
deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence
collection." 
Of course, the full extent of these programs is not
yet known. But the fact that the U.S. government is
intentionally lying to journalists, and by extension
to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the
L.A. Times report is generating little mainstream
media attention. CNN's Aaron Brown reported the story
(12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are particularly
comfortable when we're talking about things, about
ourselves if you will." 
Brown also made another, even more revealing comment: 
"There is an important and explicit bargain between
the press and the Pentagon in a time of war. We don't
do anything to endanger the troops or operations. They
don't lie to us. Each is essential in a free society
and each is made more complicated by the information
age, but it seems that sometimes in an effort to
mislead the enemy the military has come close, very
close, to crossing the line and misleading you." 
Of course, in this case the military did not come
"very close" to misleading the public; they did
mislead the public. And while Brown may have
confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the
press and the military, it would appear that the
Pentagon does not agree. If journalists were more
willing to accept the old adage that "all governments
lie," we might all be better served. 

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_15852.shtml


>From YubaNet.com

Columns
Media in the Winter of Our "Disremorse"
Author: Norman Solomon
Published on Dec 3, 2004, 07:09



Early in the coldest season, optimists think of the
day after solstice. It's predictable: the hemisphere
will start tilting toward more light and warmth. But
in the politics of human societies, there's no
reliable way to tell how long a bone-rattling chill
will last -- or how far it might go. A government's
harsher policies could provoke kinetic revulsion and
progressive resurgence. Or the dominant political
atmosphere might have an overall effect of
strengthening and perpetuating itself.

By now, the 2004 electorate has been spliced and diced
to the culinary standard of American punditry.
Countless journalists have joined with other analysts
to explain what it all really means. But the news
media still don't tell us much about underlying
aspects of mood that can't be broken out with poll
numbers. Wooden questions yield data about stiff
answers. Fact-based reporters may not offer much more
human truth than a fact-based phone book.

Today, in the real world of the United States -- in
this closely and fiercely divided country -- large
numbers of people see President George W. Bush as
despicable. But the tenor of daily reporting does
little to incorporate such assessments into the mix of
media coverage. And the conciliatory noises coming
from Democrats on Capitol Hill are misleading; they
don't reflect the hostility that persists at the
grassroots.

Potentially volatile, the rage toward Washington's
current rulers is percolating underneath the recent
often-cutesy news items about upticks of interest in
emigrating to Canada and fantasies of blue-state
secession. The extensive foreboding in the present-day
United States is often of a character and vehemence
that mainstream U.S. media reporting is either
unwilling or unable to evoke.

Many millions of Americans would tell a suitably
inquiring journalist that they don't really regret
John Kerry's loss -- that what they find horrific is
the new four-year lease on the White House for an
administration with an unrepentant track record of
mendacity and extreme ideological zeal.

With two federal branches under the control of those
zealots, the final arbiter of the third branch -- the
Supreme Court -- is now under severe threat of
wink-and-nod judicial fundamentalism. More than ever,
in this context, journalism is a thin yet vital reed.
Protection of civil liberties and abortion rights is
at imminent risk. Yet the news media keep giving
enormous deference to the USA's bastions of
consolidated economic and electoral power.

Absent from daily news coverage is remorse.

So, the major media outlets of the United States are
entering this winter in a resolute state of
"disremorse" -- about 180 degrees from any sense of
national apology or expressed regret. In the aftermath
of a 51 percent victory for the Rove-Cheney-Bush
regime on Election Day, the breast-beating and
halo-preening exercises have intensified. And while a
cast of characters -- Ashcroft, Powell, Ridge, etc. --
heads toward the exits, virtually interchangeable
players step into their roles.

With all the comings and goings, remorse is still
light-years away as top officials speak and news media
report. No need to mention people who don't have a
home; no need to focus on the children and adults with
paltry health care, or on the overall human impacts of
so much scarcity in the midst of great wealth. These
profound concerns really matter in people's lives. Yet
it's as though the reigning politicians and media have
found ways to take our minds off our minds.

The nerve-blocking anesthetics of mass media impede
the flow of feeling in unauthorized directions. Cause
and effect are disconnected, so that it seems
unavoidable and natural for children to live in
poverty across town or for U.S. troops to be killing
and dying in Iraq. Right now, it's a struggle to
disrupt the numbing media chatter about
miscalculations and mistakes -- to insist on
acknowledgment of moral culpability. America's winter
of disremorse is not about nature, it's about a lack
of nurture for what remains frozen: our capacity to
innovate and cooperate sufficiently to stop the
"leaders" who destroy life in our names.

Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of
"Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You."
His columns and other writings can be found at
normansolomon.com. 

© Copyright 2004 by YubaNet.com
Send your letters to the editor to news at yubanet.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0412040222dec04,1,1925530.story?coll=chi-news-hed

 
Dead voters on rolls, other glitches found in 6 key
states

By Geoff Dougherty, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune
staff reporter Sarah Frank contributed to this report
from Washington
Published December 4, 2004

Michel Pillet died in 2002, but his name lives on at
the University of New Mexico. He created the school's
graduate architecture program and directed it for
years.

Pillet's name lives on in another way too. He's still
listed as a registered voter in New Mexico, even
though election officials are required to purge the
names of deceased voters.

A Tribune analysis of voter records suggests that more
than 5,000 dead people remained on the rolls on
Election Day in New Mexico. The presidential election
there was decided by 6,000 votes.

And New Mexico is not alone. The Tribune's review of
voter data there and in five other key
states--Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and
Minnesota--found widespread flaws in the integrity of
voter rolls.

More than 181,000 dead people were listed on the rolls
in the six swing states, despite efforts to clean up
the country's voting system after the 2000 election.

Thousands more voters were registered to vote in two
places, which could have allowed them to cast more
than one ballot.

Further, more than 90,000 voters in Ohio cast ballots
without a valid presidential choice. Either they
decided not to choose a candidate, the machine failed
to register their choice, or they mistakenly voted for
more than one candidate.

And the FBI is investigating allegations that
Republicans in Florida mounted a large-scale campaign
to tamper with ballots.

Those developments come after an election that most
observers agree was a vast improvement over the 2000
vote.

Data on which voters cast ballots in the November
election are not available in some key states as they
await county compilations. So it's unclear whether any
people registered in two places voted more than once.
Likewise, it's impossible to tell whether ballots were
cast in the names of the deceased voters on the rolls.

But the number of voters who should have been removed
from the rolls and were not is considered cause for
concern, especially in states where the presidential
election was decided by just a few thousand votes.

"The problem of bloated registration rolls is a
serious problem," said Dan Seligson, editor of
electionline.org, a voting reform clearinghouse.

Legislation passed after the 2000 election was
designed to fix some of those problems by requiring
states to maintain better registration data. But those
requirements take effect in 2006.

New Mexico health officials each month supply a list
of recently deceased residents that Secretary of State
Rebecca Vigil-Giron uses to scrub the voter rolls. But
Pillet died in France and apparently never received a
New Mexico death certificate, she said.

`Fell through the cracks'

"He fell through the cracks," said Vigil-Giron.

Francis Walsh, a former assembly worker at Chicago's
American Can Co., retired and moved to Iowa. He died
there in June 2002, but remains a registered voter in
Des Moines.

The Tribune's analysis suggests 4,900 other Iowa
voters have died but remain on the rolls.

Bush won Iowa by 10,000 votes.

Phyllis Peters, spokeswoman for the Iowa secretary of
state's office, said workers there anticipated that
many deceased Iowans would appear on the rolls.

Peters said her agency conducts a monthly purge of
voters whose death certificates have been filed with
the state vital statistics agency. But of course some
people die elsewhere, complicating the process.

Data-entry errors can create problems too. On Walsh's
voter information, he is listed as a female. But his
death certificate said he was male, so computers did
not remove him from the voter rolls, Peters said.

Despite the number of questionable registrations and
Bush's thin margin of victory, Peters said she is
confident in the election's outcome. That's due mostly
to the 10,000 local election workers looking for
suspicious voters, she said.

"We really believe there's a lot of integrity at the
local precinct level," she said.

Among the states, Florida led the way with 64,889
registered voters who were also listed in a database
of Social Security Administration death claims, the
Tribune analysis found.

Next was Michigan, with 50,051.

The problem of duplicate voter registrations spurred
Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and top
election official, to request help from the FBI before
the election in weeding out double-voters.

"We believe that immediate and decisive action on the
federal level is necessary to send a strong message
that this type of illegal behavior and manipulation of
the electoral franchise will not be tolerated," said
Hood's letter, written Aug. 26.

William Fisher moved from Florida to Ohio and
registered to vote. He was surprised to learn that he
could have cast a second ballot in Florida.

"I'm retired now, and out of Florida, so I shouldn't
be listed as a Florida voter anymore," he said.

In Ohio, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson is
demanding a review of the election, saying too many
questions have been raised to let Bush's win stand
without further examination.

"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live
with fraud and stealing," Jackson said Sunday at Mt.
Hermon Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio.

Voting complaints in Ohio have focused on the use of
antiquated punch-card voting machines--the same type
of machines that led to thousands of hanging chads in
Florida four years ago.

Ohio recount sought

Meanwhile, third-party candidates, joined by Sen. John
Kerry's campaign organization, have requested a
recount in Ohio, which would begin after the election
results are certified. That must happen by Monday.

A hearing on the recount request was held in federal
court in Columbus on Friday.

County-by-county results provided to The Associated
Press on Friday indicated Bush's margin of victory in
Ohio will be about 119,000 votes, smaller than the
unofficial margin of 136,000, mainly because of the
addition of provisional ballots.

Ohio's so-called spoilage rate, ballots cast without a
discernable vote for president, was lower than
Florida's in the 2000 election. But the number of
discarded ballots--92,000--represents a significant
number, given that Bush's margin of victory was about
119,000 .

The state Democratic Party is watching the potential
recount carefully, said spokesman Dan Trevas.

"It could be that we lost it," he said. "But if
there's a little more to it, we've got to check it
out. Let's just make sure everything's aboveboard."

In Florida, new touch-screen voting machines
eliminated overvotes and chads. But some allege that
ATM-like technology has created other problems.

University of California, Berkeley, professor Michael
Hout compared voting patterns in the Florida counties
that used the new machines with those that relied on
ballots similar to the multiple-choice forms on
standardized tests.

He found differences in those patterns that led him to
conclude that computer problems with the new machines
had given an edge to Bush. He suggested software
glitches could have left some Kerry votes uncounted,
or assigned them mistakenly to Bush.

"Statistically what we have is a smoke alarm that's
beeping," said Hout. "It's up to the local people in
Florida to figure out what to do about it."

Also in Florida, Democratic congressional candidate
Jeff Fisher, who was defeated Nov. 2, said he had seen
e-mails outlining a Republican plot to steal the
presidential election. The plot, he said, involved
election workers who created bogus voter
registrations. The workers then rigged computers to
show those ghost voters had cast ballots for Bush.

The FBI confirmed that Fisher had filed a complaint
and that agents were investigating.


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune 



http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120304C.shtml

Something's Fishy in Ohio 
    By Jesse Jackson 
    The Chicago Sun-Times 

    Tuesday 30 November 2004 

    In the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets
protesting what they charge is a fixed election. U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this
nation's concern about apparent voting irregularities.
The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage.
But in the United States, massive and systemic voter
irregularities go unreported and unnoticed. 

    Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in
Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred
by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and
discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as
those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in.
Consider: 

    In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a
recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's
three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't
counted the votes and certified the election. Some
93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted;
155,000 provisional ballots are only now being
counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior
to the election haven't been counted. 

    Ohio determines the election, but the state has
not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made
intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in
charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds - like
Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 - a dual
role: secretary of state with control over voting
procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio
campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a
thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's
vote can be made. 

    Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in
place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to
cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county,
even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting
the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure
that those who went to the wrong place by mistake
could have their votes counted. The result of this
decision - why does this not surprise? - was to
disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily
Democratic Cuyahoga County. 

    Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic
machines that provided no paper record. The maker of
many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co.,
promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in
Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush
3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast. 

    Blackwell also presided over a voting system that
resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly
Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting
lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received
ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting
places. Democratic precincts received inadequate
numbers of machines in too few polling places that
were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits
for the very working people who could least afford the
time. 

    In Ohio, as in Florida and Pennsylvania, there was
a stark disconnect between the exit polls and the
tabulated results, with the former favoring John Kerry
and the latter George Bush. The chance of this
occurring in these three states, according to
Professor Steven Freeman of the University of
Pennsylvania, is about 250 million to 1. 

    In one of dozens of examples, Ellen Connally, an
African-American Supreme Court candidate running an
underfunded race at the bottom of the ticket, received
over 257,000 more votes than Kerry in 37 counties. She
ran better than Kerry in the areas of the state where
she wasn't known and didn't campaign than she did
where she was known and did campaign. 

    There should be a federal investigation of the
vote count in Ohio, with the partisan secretary of
state removing himself from the scene. 

    In Cleveland, as in Kiev, Ukraine, citizens have
the right to know that the election is run fairly and
every vote counted honestly. Citizens have the right
to nonpartisan election officials. Citizens have the
right to voting machines that keep a paper record and
allow for an independent audit and recount. 

    This country needs no more Floridas and Ohios.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We call for a
constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to
vote for all U.S. citizens and to empower Congress to
establish federal standards and nonpartisan
administration of elections. Harris and Blackwell are
insults to the people they represent, and stains upon
the president whose election they sought to ensure.
Democracy should not be for export only. 

  


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Go to Original 

    Will the Democrats Now Stand and Fight? 
    By Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis 
    The Columbus Free Press 

    Wednesday 01 December 2004 

In Ohio 2004, it's the People versus the Party of Hate
& Terror and the Party of Duck and Run...but will the
Democrats now stand and fight?
    As the Reverend Jesse Jackson rocked a cheering
crowd here in Columbus Sunday, a national movement was
born. Shouts of "you got that right!" rang through the
hall as Jackson preached that what Karl Rove and
George Bush and Kenneth Blackwell are doing to the
2004 vote in Ohio would not fly in Iraq or Ukraine or
Afghanistan. 

    Jackson plans to return to Columbus on Thursday as
his organization Rainbow/PUSH files a legal challenge
to overturn Ohio's election results. On Saturday,
December 4, Jackson will join voter rights advocates
for a symposium at Columbus' Africentric School on the
near east side. Earlier in the day, demonstrators will
gather at the Ohio Statehouse to protest voter
suppression and irregularities that occurred on
November 2. 

    Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has finally joined
a legal challenge to the 2004 Ohio vote. 

    Central Ohio, America's leading test market, the
quintessential home of college football and Wendy's
hamburgers, has become Ground Zero in the struggle of
the century over a vote count that has not yet been
certified. More and more commentators are drawing
parallels between Ohio and Ukraine where "losing"
candidates received 53% and 54% respectively, in exit
polls. 

    Word has spread that the election of 2004 is being
stolen, starting here. Withholding of ballots and
voting machines, rigging of electronic equipment,
harassment, intimidation, official misinformation and
a recount stonewall are just some of the GOP dirty
tricks and corruption that define the 2004 Ohio vote.
When Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell runs an election while co-chairing the Ohio
Bush campaign, it's not hard to guess how a vote count
will go - except that it's not yet over. 

    Apathy was not an issue here. Thousands of
activists and ordinary citizens desperate to rid the
nation of George W. Bush poured into Ohio with the
uniformly expressed intent of saving our democracy.
Countless streets throughout the state were canvassed
over and over and over again. Phone callers overran
their lists. Election day volunteers stood around with
nothing to do because there were so many of them. 

    But the Bush/Rove fix was in. And exactly how it
was done is becoming clear thanks to grassroots groups
like the Election Protection Coalition, the League of
Pissed-Off Voters, CommonCause and many more. 

    Along with theft and deception, this year's
attempted replay of Bush coup 2000 has entrenched the
GOP's official credentials as the party of Hate &
Terror. As the most catastrophic domestic regime since
Herbert Hoover, the Rovian machine had just three
cards to play. 

    First, Karl Rove fired up the GOP hate base with
gay marriage. In Ohio, that was the Issue One campaign
to amend the state Constitution to outlaw gay marriage
and domestic partnerships. Blackwell also co-chaired
this campaign. 

    In 1988 Bush One ran against Willie Horton, a
black man freed from prison under Democratic nominee
Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Choreographed
by Lee Atwater, Rove's gutter guru, Bush pushed the
race hate button for all it was worth. This year,
"Protection of marriage" became the code word for GOP
anti-gay bigotry. New target, same game. 

    Second, Rove used the terror bogey, the bedrock of
all totalitarian campaigns. With bin Laden's "October
Surprise" GOP campaign pitch the Friday before the
vote, Rove and Osama made Bush a cartoon of
simple-minded "steady strength." The 9/11 attacks
happened on Bush's watch; but Rove made terror this
year's Reichstag fire for a violent, authoritarian
regime. 

    Third, Rove made sure there was a war on. Bush
attacked Iraq for its oil, his Daddy karma, and more.
But Rove is a student of history who knows that no
sitting president has been ousted during a war. It
could have been Korea or Grenada, Iran or Grand
Fenwick. But when Bush mouthed the words "war
president" he was playing Rove's trump card. 

    The GOP's other ace was John Kerry, whose vote for
the Iraq war left him open to Rove's flip flop
attacks. On Iraq, the economy, the ecology and more,
Bush has been merely a flop. 

    Kerry's tainted Iraq votes polluted his war record
and his standing as an alternative to endless war. Yet
with stellar debate performances and a decent final
month, Kerry may have actually carried the national
vote - if there were a fair count. 

    But with ballots still being bitterly contested in
Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, Kerry conceded too soon.
His plea for "national healing" raised gales of
laughter at Fox and Rove's White House. 

    Kerry seemed to be walking away from the tens of
millions of good-hearted Democrats and democrats who
pinned their hopes on him to end the Bush nightmare. 

    It was a terrible moment for grassroots organizers
who mobilized thousands of inner city and other voters
for Kerry, only to see them turned away at the polls
or their ballots shredded with every Rovian dirty
trick imaginable. In a horrific display of contempt
for the democratic process and for people of color,
similar things were done in Florida and, to varying
degrees, in every other swing state. 

    In the past weeks, it's become abundantly clear
that a fair vote count in Ohio would have given Kerry
the presidency. Having pledged to "make every vote
count," Kerry had a solemn obligation to guarantee
just that. 

    Tens of thousands of people came out in the rain,
stood in line up to eleven hours, and were utterly
trashed by the GOP machine. Kerry had a sacred duty to
honor those people by not conceding until every one of
those cases had been heard and every one of those
instances made part of the national record. His
concession gave GOP bloviators open season to proclaim
victory for a bigot-based theocracy based on endless
war, total terror and a terminal assault on American
democracy. 

    But grassroots groups have fought back with
citizen hearings to get the stories of disenfranchised
voters certified. We've organized, campaigned and
publicized until it's become clear that this story
will not go away. 

    Independent citizen groups, including the Green
and Libertarian Parties, CommonCause, Move-on.org and
others are kicking in to organize and train the
hundreds of volunteers it will take to monitor the
re-count in Ohio's 88 counties. 

    By fighting tooth and nail against a fair recount,
Ken Blackwell is leading the GOP machine in admitting
it has something to hide. It is supremely illogical to
scorn "conspiracy theorists" who question the November
2 vote count while desperately stonewalling an open
accounting. 

    We are not backing down. What's at stake here is
not just a single presidential election, but the right
of all Americans to vote and to have those votes
counted in all future elections. 

    And, finally, attorneys representing the
Kerry-Edwards campaign have filed papers in Delaware
County, Ohio, to intervene in legal proceedings in
defense of Green Party presidential candidate David
Cobb, Libertarian Michael Badnarik and their legal
counsel, the National Voting Rights Institute, who are
seeking a recount of all votes cast for president in
the Ohio 2004 general election. 

    The grassroots will not surrender to the Party of
Hate, Terror and Shredded Ballots. As in Ukraine, the
whole world is starting to watch. 

    This election is not over. 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis are co-authors
of the upcoming "Another Stolen Election: Voices of
the Disenfranchised, 2004," from freepress.org, of
which they are senior editor and publisher. Wasserman
is lead plaintiff in a FOIA lawsuit demanding access
to all Ohio voting machines; Dr. Fitrakis, an
attorney, convened and moderated central Ohio hearings
that took scores of affidavits from Ohioans denied
their right to vote. 
  

  -------



http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120304A.shtml

CIA Was Wary of U.S. Interrogation Methods in Iraq 
    By Greg Miller 
    The Los Angeles Times 

    Thursday 02 December 2004 

Report warning of possible abuses was sent to
officials before Abu Ghraib photos surfaced.
    CIA officers in Iraq were ordered to stay away
from a U.S. military interrogation facility last year
because agency officials questioned the way detainees
were being interrogated, according to a December 2003
report on a secret special operations unit. 

    The report warning of possible abuses of Iraqi
detainees in U.S. custody was sent to commanders in
Iraq a month before the now infamous photographs of
the Abu Ghraib prison emerged early this year, the
Pentagon said Wednesday in confirming some of the
findings. 

    The report by retired Army Col. Stuart A.
Herrington - who visited Iraq in 2003 to assess U.S.
intelligence gathering operations against Iraqi
insurgents - warned that U.S. special operations
troops and CIA operatives might be abusing Iraqi
prisoners. 

    Herrington's report went up the chain of command
to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq at the time, who ordered that the possible abuses
be investigated, Pentagon officials said. 

    Pentagon officials could not say Wednesday what
became of that investigation. The Herrington report
was included as a classified attachment to a report
released this summer by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay and
Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, who investigated the role
of U.S. intelligence officials in Iraqi prisoner
abuse. The contents of the attachment were first
reported Wednesday by the Washington Post. 

    Herrington included a warning in the year-old
report that Task Force 121- a secret unit made up of
special operations troops and CIA paramilitary
operatives - needed to be "reined in with respect to
its treatment of detainees," according to a source
familiar with the report. 

    The source said Herrington reported that the CIA
had ordered its officers to steer clear of a detention
facility being run by the military because of the way
prisoners were being handled there. 

    Herrington wrote that one CIA official told him
that the agency "had been directed not to have any
contact" with the interrogation facility run by Task
Force 121 "because practices there were in
contravention" to agency rules on questioning
detainees. 

    The source did not say whether the report detailed
the practices. 

    Herrington's report also warned about the perils
of a system in which the CIA was keeping detainees off
prison records, largely so that they could be
questioned before their detention was revealed
publicly. The Fay-Jones report confirmed dozens of
cases of so-called ghost detainees, whose detentions
were kept secret. 

    The CIA inspector general's office is still
investigating allegations of detainee abuses, a U.S.
intelligence official said. Several cases involving
the agency have been referred to the Justice
Department, and one CIA operative has been charged in
connection with the death of a prisoner held in CIA
custody in Afghanistan. 

    The official said that "the CIA has worked closely
with the Department of Defense to investigate possible
cases of abuse whenever there are allegations." 



http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/local_news/epaper/2004/12/01/c1c_votesuit_1201.html

Suit accuses LePore of data request delay
By George Bennett

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

WEST PALM BEACH — A group conducting a "fraud audit"
of the 2004 election sued Palm Beach County Elections
Supervisor Theresa LePore on Tuesday, accusing her of
stonewalling requests for public records related to
the Nov. 2 voting.

A dozen other Florida counties could face similar
lawsuits, said Bev Harris, executive director of Black
Box Voting Inc.

  
The Seattle-area activist is in Orlando this week
attending a conference of Florida elections chiefs.
Harris became a celebrity among electronic-voting
critics last year when she publicized the existence of
an unsecured Web site that contained proprietary
source code and other internal documents for Diebold
touch-screen voting machines.

Black Box Voting wants to examine internal audit logs
and other records from voting machines and tabulating
machines in each of Florida's 67 counties. The group
also wants copies of correspondence and e-mails
between elections offices and voting equipment vendors
between Oct. 12 and Nov. 3.

Harris said she hasn't been satisfied with the
responses from most of Florida's large counties, but
Palm Beach County has been the worst.

"They seem to be running out the clock," Harris said.

LePore countered: "They want stuff and they want it
right now. They don't understand that we've got
procedures to go through."

LePore said her office is still figuring out how much
it will cost to produce the records Harris' group
wants. LePore expects the total to be at least $3,000
and said she'll demand advance payment.

Black Box Voting has made similar requests to about
3,000 jurisdictions nationwide, Harris said, but is
focusing first on Florida because the state has broad
public-records laws.




http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120204V.shtml

 At a Loss for Words 
    By James Ridgeway 
    The Village Voice 

    Tuesday 30 November 2004 

FBI's translation scandal heats up; more
whistle-blowers emerge.
    Among the unanswered questions of 9-11 is the part
played by the FBI in handling the various tips and
information pouring through its translation section at
the Washington, D.C., field office. It is in this
division that certified language specialists with top
secret security clearances handle the most sensitive
information, from wiretaps to face-to-face interview
translations between an investigating agent and a
suspect. The translators often have inordinate power.
Because of their expertise (or rather, the limited
number of languages spoken by their bosses),
translators often make the decisions on which cases to
fully translate and which not to bother with. Errors
can creep in: Translators may misunderstand a dialect
and thus lose the meaning or context of information.
On occasion, some translators' grasp of English is so
poor that they cannot convey nuances of the speakers. 

    This division is already under fire from the
Justice Department's inspector general and
whistle-blowers, most notably Sibel Edmonds, who was
fired from her job as a Farsi translator when she
protested the way the work was being handled. Since
Edmonds began speaking out, others have come forward. 

    A November 8 letter to the Justice Department from
Senate Judiciary chair Charles Grassley and ranking
minority member Patrick Leahy told of one such case:
"A current member of the staff of Senator Grassley has
continued to have discussions over the past year with
a current contract linguist for the FBI. The
allegations made by this current employee are very
troubling. Specifically, this employee articulated
that translators are often deficient in their
abilities to translate into English. The employee
noted that some translators who are presently employed
by the FBI or who are employed by contractors may in
fact fail the English test, but still be provided a
passing grade surreptitiously because of personal
contacts among the translator staff. This employee
also noted that supervisors charged with ensuring that
materials are translated accurately are often
deficient in their own translating abilities." 

    Edmonds, whose previous letters to the two
senators were marked "classified" by John Ashcroft's
Justice Department, purportedly in the interests of
national security, is readying a federal court appeal
to the gag order. She complained to her superiors that
translators were unable to handle the languages in
which they had been certified. For example, in one
case, a man did not have proficiency in basic English,
but was hired under pressure from family members who
also had worked for the FBI. This man, according to
Edmonds, not only was "placed in sole charge of
translating for some of the most important/sensitive
intelligence investigations, he was also sent to
Guantánamo Bay to translate information collected from
the detainees." 

    Meanwhile, other cases are turning up. One of them
involves efforts by a longtime FBI counterintelligence
agent to alert his superiors to special treatment
accorded translators. John M. Cole, an FBI
counterintelligence program officer with 18 years of
experience, wrote Director Robert Mueller, in a letter
dated March 17, 2003, "I have prepared several risk
assessments concerning applicants for language
specialists positions. In the majority of these risk
assessments I found numerous areas where the
backgrounds of these individuals had not been
thoroughly investigated. In one case, I discovered
that the applicant's father was a former military
attaché who had been assigned to a foreign embassy in
Washington, D.C. Despite my findings, these
individuals were hired, given unescorted access and
Top Secret security clearances." The applicant's
father was a military attaché at the Pakistani
embassy. According to Cole, it is well-known in
Washington that all the Pakistani military attachés
are in fact Pakistani intelligence officers. 

  -------



http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/1526202

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004
Jesse Jackson: Kerry's "Early Concession Betrayed the
Trust of the Voters"

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As voter fraud in Ukraine's election dominates the
headlines, we take a look at the U.S. election and the
widespread reports of voter irregularities in Ohio. We
speak with the Rev. Jesse Jackson who is calling for
an Ohio recount and an attorney filing a lawsuit in
the Ohio Supreme Court this week to contest the
election. [includes rush transcript] 
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We turn now to election news: Democracy Now co-host
Juan Gonzalez writes in today's New York Daily News: 
"Voter fraud in the Ukraine? Give me a break. 

"It has been a month now and we still don't have a
clear count of the votes for our own presidential race
from the state of Ohio. 

"For those who may have forgotten, Ohio supposedly
assured George W. Bush a second term in the White
House - only the most important job on the planet. 

"The morning after the election, we were told Bush was
ahead of John Kerry in that state's unofficial count
by 139,000 votes, or 2.5%. 

"At the time there were 155,000 uncounted provisional
ballots and an unknown number of overseas ballots, but
Kerry concluded they would not produce enough of a
margin to erase his deficit, so he promptly conceded. 

"At the same time, given the bitter Democratic
memories of the 2000 Florida fiasco, he assured his
supporters he would fight to have every vote properly
counted this time. 

"Within a few days, other problems began to show up in
Ohio's preliminary tally." 


Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader. He is the
founder of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, a progressive
organization fighting for social change. This past
Sunday, he appeared at a rally of over 500 in Columbus
to publicly endorse a presidential recount in Ohio.
Jackson's Rainbow Push Coalition has now joined with
the Green and Libertarian Parties in demanding the
recount. 
Cliff Arnebeck, public interest lawyer who is filing a
lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court this week contesting
the election. He is co-chair of the Alliance for
Democracy and Chairman of the Legal Affairs Committee
of Common Cause in Ohio.

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT 
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AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jesse Jackson, what have you
been doing in Ohio? Why do you feel that a recount
could change the outcome of the presidential election?


JESSE JACKSON: Well, this is November 30 -- 28 days
later and the election has not been certified. The
judge will not order a recount because there has not
yet been a count. Therefore, we need a full and
thorough federal investigation. For example, in the
spring of the year, a provisional ballot, you could
vote any place in the county. By September, by
November, Secretary of State had shifted it to you
only vote in the precinct, and with some precincts
changing, it created big frustrations. So 155,000
ballots haven’t still been counted. There are many
thousands not yet processed -- overcount and
undercount. You have a case in Warren, Ohio where they
declared a Homeland Security alert. I mean no building
in Warren is over three stories high, yet they locked
out the press and independent observers. Another case
that I found to be astounding which I am sure Cliff
can talk about, is a black woman, Ellen Connally ran
for state Supreme Court judge. In Cuyahoga County, in
Cleveland where she is best known, Kerry got 170,000
more votes. Elsewhere in the state, around Hamilton
County, Cincinnati, Butler, Clermont, where she is
least well-known, she got 190,000 more votes than
Kerry. Now, that smells. We need a thorough
investigation with forensic computer experts to see
were there any tampering in those machines where
there's no ability to do an audit trail. Then we need
to consider the recount. We first need to have a
count. 

AMY GOODMAN: I am looking at Juan Gonzalez’s piece.
This may coincide with what you are talking about. He
says in the fourth ward on Cleveland's east side, two
fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.
In precinct 4F located at Benedictine High School,
Martin Luther King Drive, Kerry received 293 votes,
Bush 21. Michael Perutka, the candidate for the
ultra-conservative Anti-immigrant Constitutional
Party, an amazing 215 votes. That many black votes for
Perutka is about as likely as all those Jewish votes
for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach County in 2000.
He says in virtually all the precincts that he looked
at, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000 even
though there was a record turnout in the black
community this time and even though blacks voted
overwhelmingly for Kerry. Cliff Arnebeck, can you
explain further what this pattern is? Is it a pattern?


CLIFF ARNEBECK: Yes, there's a pattern of extensive
irregularity in the Ohio election. And in contrast to
the conventional election count that's going on now,
we have exit polls which are conducted by news
organizations, hiring professionals using scientific
methods to count the votes and those exit polls showed
Kerry winning the Ohio election. So, when you compare
those exit polls with the counting that's been going
on through this partisan process, it seems pretty
clear that we have a serious issue here about who won
this election. And the conclusion, drawn on the day
after the election, that Mr. Bush won the election, is
very much in doubt. 

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jackson, Democracy Now! just
went to Spain and Italy and on one of the main TV
stations called RAI in Rome, the interviewer asked
about the election and I said, “Well, really we don't
really know who won.” And his eyebrows raised very
high and he said, “Excuse me. Kerry conceded. Haven't
you heard?” Now what about this, Reverend Jackson?
What about Kerry immediately conceding? 

JESSE JACKSON: The early concession betrayed the trust
of the voters. We have a moral obligation and a legal
obligation to see that every vote counts and whether
Kerry gets the most votes or not, we must break a
precedent of fraudulent elections. For the Secretary
of the State, in fact, can be the co-chair of a
campaign and run the process -- that's like a team
owner of a baseball team being the umpire at game
seven of the World Series. You can't be a team owner
and be a referee at the same time. You can't have
Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell as chairs of the
campaign and in charge of the process. It taints the
credibility of the process at the very beginning. 

AMY GOODMAN: What about the $51 million that John
Kerry has? The largest amount of money a presidential
candidate has had after an election. He's not in the
red, he's in the black. The biggest amount of money
any presidential candidate has had in history, well
over half what George Bush has. He could use that
money for a recount. Instead -- the poor Green Party
is raising the money. 

JESSE JACKSON: You could take a couple million dollars
of that money and hire Cliff Arnebeck’s law firm and
partners and the Common Cause lawyers who are credible
and bright and able lawyers. You could you take a
couple million dollars and put a renewed light on
Ohio. That can determine not only the outcome of this
election but the future of democratic elections. We
have to go beyond this matter. We really need, which
we do not have, we need the Constitutional right to
vote for President federally protected. We do not have
the Constitutional right to vote for President. We
only have the state's right to vote. We asked 50 state
separate and unequal elections within those states,
Ohio for example, 88 counties, each running their own
scheme. We must now go to another level. Not only
should we count these votes, we need an amendment to
the Constitution. We need -- all Americans need the
Constitutional, individual right, federally protected
right to vote for the President. 

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jackson, have you talked to John
Kerry about this? 

JESSE JACKSON: I did talk with him about the election
and he first thanked us for our continued effort, but
will not take a public position, nor offer any
resources at this time, substantial resources to help
make it happen. So we are doing it on our will. 

AMY GOODMAN: So what's he doing with his $51 million? 

JESSE JACKSON: I do not know. It make think so much
that when the reason [inaudible] those that are
fighting: the Greens, the Libertarians, and those who
have found common ground. Dr. King got the Nobel Peace
Prize and Lyndon Johnson gave King a White House
reception. He said, “I thank you very much for the
reception, but all Americans need the right to vote.”
Johnson said, “Dr. King, I like you very much. You
know I do, I like you. I regard you highly. But I
can't render the right to vote unilaterally, I just
can’t. I wish could, but I can't. The bad news is that
Congress can, but won't. So you can't have the right
to vote.” So the President talked, so we went to
Selma, the common people rose up. And there again, the
common people must rise up and demand that their vote
count. So to me, this campaign in Ohio is not so much
about Kerry as it is about Fannie Lou Hamer. It’s
about Medgar Evers. It’s about Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney. It’s about the people's will to democracy. If
people can fight [inaudible] for democracy in the
Ukraine, we can do that here. 

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you very much for being with us. 

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.boston.com/dailynews/336/region/Former_Bush_campaign_official_:.shtml

Former Bush campaign official indicted for
phone-jamming 
By Erik Stetson, Associated Press, 12/1/2004 19:45

ADVERTISEMENT
 
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) A federal grand jury on Wednesday
indicted James Tobin, President Bush's former New
England campaign chairman, on four counts related to
the Republican jamming of get-out-the-vote phone lines
on Election Day 2002. 

State Democrats, who have filed a lawsuit over the
jamming, had accused Tobin in October of involvement
in the conspiracy. 

Tobin, 44, stepped down Oct. 15, but denied
involvement at the time. 

''I am saddened to learn that this action has been
taken against me,'' he said Wednesday in a statement.
''I have great respect for the justice system and plan
to fight back to clear my name.'' 

The four-count indictment charges Tobin with
conspiracy to commit telephone harassment and aiding
and abetting telephone harassment. He is the
highest-level Republican official to be implicated in
the case and faces up to five years in prison if
convicted. 

The 2002 jamming consisted of computer-generated calls
to get-out-the-vote phones run by state Democrats and
the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters' union. More
than 800 hang-up calls tied up phones for about 1 1/2
hours. 

The jamming's intent was to ''annoy and harass those
called and disrupt those two organizations' efforts to
encourage and assist citizens in exercising their
right to vote,'' the Justice Department said in a news
release. The Department identified Tobin as one of
several people who orchestrated the jamming. 

Democrats praised the indictment, but said it was
overdue. 

''I think it's unfortunate the Justice Department
delayed, for whatever reasons that it did, until after
the election,'' state Democratic chairwoman Kathy
Sullivan said. ''I hope this was not delayed for
political reasons. Here we are, four weeks after the
election, and President Bush's former New England
campaign chairman is indicted.'' 

Tobin in 2002 was northeast political director for the
Republican Senatorial Committee, the party operation
working to elect Republicans to the Senate. Among the
races affected by the phone jamming was the U.S.
Senate contest between Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen
and Republican U.S. Rep. John E. Sununu. It was
considered a cliffhanger, though Sununu ended up
winning by about 20,000 votes. 

Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the
state GOP, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to a
conspiracy charge in summer. He also admitted paying
$15,600 to a telemarketing firm, GOP Marketplace of
Alexandria, Va. 

Prosecutors say GOP Marketplace then hired another
business to make the calls. Republican consultant
Allen Raymond, GOP Marketplace's former president,
also pleaded guilty in summer to a conspiracy charge
in federal court. 

McGee and Raymond are to be sentenced in February and
March. The indictment describes Tobin as go-between
who put the two men in touch. 

Sullivan said Democrats will continue to pursue their
lawsuit and are determined to trace the funding behind
the jamming. 

''What I'm looking forward to is a complete and
thorough uncovering of who knew about this and where
the money came from,'' she said. 

Tobin, of Bangor, Maine, founded a communications and
political consulting company there before getting into
GOP politics. Before his latest jobs, he served as
national political director for publisher Steve
Forbes' presidential campaign. 


http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1130-27.htm

Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 by the Toronto
Star  
U.N. Can Survive U.S. Assault
In the end, American attempts to discredit world body,
security council will fail
 
by Hans Blix 
  
The results of a review of the functioning of the
U.N., conducted by a panel appointed by the
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, will soon be on the
table. That there is a need to discuss an array of
questions is not in doubt — but the fact that the most
powerful member of the organization shows disdain for
it is not exactly conducive to a positive
intergovernmental debate. 

We learned before the invasion of Iraq that in the
view of the U.S. administration, the security council
had the choice of voting with the U.S. for armed
action — or being irrelevant. A majority on the
council did not allow itself to be pushed into
supporting the action, and the invasion took place.
Many saw this as a loss of prestige for the council
and as a crisis for the U.N.. In one way it was, and
is. Institutions such as the security council are like
instruments to be played. 

If members choose not to play or are completely out of
tune, no marching music results. It is only when the
construction of the instruments is found deficient or
outmoded that repair is meaningful. 

The refusal last year of a majority of the security
council to follow the tune that the U.S. wished the
council to play can also be seen as the saving of the
council's authority and respectability. How would the
world look at the council today if it had endorsed an
armed action to eradicate weapons of mass destruction
— that did not exist and whose evidence was often
concocted, even forged? 

Today most countries and most people consider the
action launched in Iraq a grave error or worse, and
much of American public opinion — perhaps even a
majority — shares this view. Yet the new U.S.
administration seems to take victory in the
presidential election not only as support for strong
positions and actions against terrorist threats
(probably a justified interpretation), but also as
support for its decision to launch the war on Iraq and
for its disdainful attitude to the U.N.. 

It is as if the U.N. had insulted the U.S. The
Republican convention that renominated George Bush
erupted in applause when the vice-president said that
Mr. Bush would "never seek a permission slip to defend
the American people". Fine, except that Iraq was not a
threat, not a growing threat, and probably not even a
distant threat. 

We also see an intense and large-scale campaign of
vilification, depicting the U.N. as "corrupt" because
the oil-for-food programme — instituted and supervised
by the security council and its most powerful members,
including the U.S. — enabled Iraq, the buyers of Iraqi
oil and the sellers of products to Iraq, to siphon off
money and pass it on illegally to Saddam Hussein's
regime. 

The fraud, although widely suspected and estimated at
about a billion dollars a year in the media, was not
easy for the program administration to track down and
prove. The council and its members saw it with open
eyes just as they saw the billions that flowed to
Saddam from oil exports to neighbouring states. The
program functioned as a reasonably effective break
against the import of weapons and dual-use items,
which was its major objective. Today it serves as a
campaign platform against the U.N.. So long as the
current climate remains, it is doubtful if any
meaningful discussion about U.N. reform can be
pursued. 

It has been suggested that in the review of the
functioning of the U.N., an effort should be made to
examine the circumstances in which the use of force
can and should be authorized. Some would wish to see a
greater use of the council's power to hold members to
their duties to protect their own citizens: to
intervene by force, if necessary, in situations of
genocide, as in Rwanda or Darfur. Others want to
search for a reformulation of article 51 of the
charter, in order to give some room for pre-emptive
action. I am not optimistic about charter amendments
in either case, nor am I sure that they really are
needed. 

I also think it unlikely that any agreed language
could be found that explicitly allows members to use
force pre-emptively or preventively without
authoriZation of the security council. It is more
likely that an answer to the problem will slowly
emerge through precedents. It is also important, as
Kofi Annan has noted, that the security council
actively considers and monitors threats posed by
possible weapons of mass destruction, giving all
members the feeling that the issue is taken seriously
and that there is a readiness to take joint action,
where there is convincing evidence of a threat that is
significant and near in time. 

The security council remains potentially a vital
institution. The Iraq war has demonstrated the
handicap that followed from not acting with its
authorization. 

For greater legitimacy, the security council needs to
represent a large part of the world's population,
hence a need for the presence in the council of the
most populous countries in all continents. One
argument, not infrequently advanced, I find totally
objectionable: that those states that pay the greatest
contributions to the U.N. budget should merit a seat.
The seats should not be for sale. 

Hans Blix is the former U.N. chief weapons inspector.
This is an edited excerpt from a speech given last
week at the University of Cambridge. 

© 2004 The Toronto Star