[Liberation News Service]: LNS Post Coup II Supplement (12/23/04)
richard power
richardpower at wordsofpower.net
Thu Dec 23 15:16:04 CST 2004
Read the following tales of heroism and
patriotism...share them with others...keep the
resistance alive...there is a purpose to this
struggle...there is a truth being
revealed...painfully...
Theft of 2004 Election
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: 2004 Democratic
Presidential candidate John Kerry will file today, in
the United States District Court for the Southern
District of Ohio, papers in support of the Green
Party/Libertarian Party recount effort. Specifically,
Kerry will be filing a request for expedited discovery
regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a
motion for a preservation order to protect any and all
discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter.
Triad Systems has come under scrutiny recently after
Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for
Hocking County, swore out an affidavit in which she
described her witnessing the tampering of electronic
voting equipment by a Triad representative. Rep. John
Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House
Judiciary Committee, has requested an investigation
into this matter by the FBI and the Hocking County
prosecutor…
Kerry's entry into this recount effort changes the
math on this matter dramatically. He can likewise show
irreparable harm, and unlike the Green and Libertarian
candidates, he can also prove a substantial chance for
success on the merits because he lost the Ohio vote by
a statistical whisker..
Perhaps the most significant aspect of all this, from
the activist point of view, has been the effectiveness
of the telephone calls and letters to Kerry. The
activist push to get him involved had a very
significant effect on his decision to enter this
effort. Likewise, calls to other Senators in order to
convince them to join House members in challenging the
election have likewise had significant effect. If such
an effort continues, the activists involved will very
likely see the desired
SETH SUTEL, Associated Press: The top Democrat on the
House Judiciary Committee has asked The Associated
Press and five broadcast networks to turn over raw
exit poll data collected on Election Day so that any
discrepancies between the data and the certified
election results can be investigated.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan said in a letter
released Tuesday in Washington that the polling firms
that conducted the polls on behalf of the news
organizations, Mitofsky International and Edison Media
Research, had declined to share the information with
the committee.
"Without the raw data, the committee will be severely
handicapped in its efforts to show the need for
serious election reform in the United States," Conyers
said in the letter.
The AP and the five television outlets — ABC, CBS,
NBC, CNN, and Fox — formed a consortium called the
National Election Pool to conduct exit polls for this
year's election after disbanding a previous exit poll
group called the Voter News Service, which had
problems in both the 2000 and 2002 elections.
Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the National Election
Pool and a CNN employee, said the poll data were still
being analyzed and that the group's board would decide
how to release a full report on the data early next
year. "To release any information now would be
incomplete," she said.
Tim Grieve interviews Rep. John Conyers, Salon.com:
"You know, orchestrated attempts don't always require
a conspiracy," Conyers told Salon on Monday. Conyers
said that Bush's supporters in Ohio may have worked to
suppress the vote based on cues rather than orders
from party officials. "People get the drift from other
elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about
how they're going to win the election."
Conyers isn't looking to overturn the election, and
he won't say that the Republicans stole it; coming
from a member of Congress, such an allegation would be
"reckless," he said. But neither is he willing to put
the election of 2004 behind him yet. This is the
second presidential election in a row in which
Republicans have succeeded in suppressing the vote,
Conyers said, and he wants to ensure that the system
is changed so that it won't happen again. He'll
continue his investigation, he'll join the Rev. Jesse
Jackson in a protest rally in Ohio on Jan. 3, and when
the new Congress meets in January he'll push for
further investigation and reform…
Your first public forum on the 2004 election was
called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in
Ohio?" Do you know the answer to that question yet?
Well, dozens and dozens of things went wrong. It
depends on what part of the state we're going to
examine. In Hocking County, a private company accessed
an election machine and altered and tampered with it
in the absence of election observers. It disturbed a
deputy chair of the election in the county so much
that she has given a sworn affidavit that has been
turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
and we're in the process of running that down. But
what about in Cleveland, Ohio? There, thousands of
people claimed that their vote for Kerry was turned
into a vote for Bush. Poll workers made mistakes that
might have cost thousands of votes in Cleveland. And
in Youngstown, machines turned an undetermined number
of Kerry votes into Bush votes as well. Provisional
ballots were thrown out. There were several
conflicting rules. There was mass confusion. In Warren
County, they talked about [the possibility that]
terrorism might close down the election. I mean,
please…
Do you believe that there was an orchestrated
attempt to steal the election?
Well, you know, orchestrated attempts don't always
require a conspiracy. People get the drift from other
elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about
how they're going to win the election. When you have
the exit-polling information discrepancies that
occurred in 2004, where the odds of all the swing
states coming in so much stronger for Bush than the
exit polls indicated - they say that that is,
statistically, almost an improbability.
[People] are saying, "No, no, no, that doesn't mean
much." But it means a lot. It feeds this growing,
[but] not provable feeling among millions of Americans
that this was another unfair election.
Do you have that feeling?
Sure, I have a feeling that whenever we can come
across ways to make elections fairer or work better or
improve the process or simplify the regulations or
make voting more available to people who have language
problems or disabilities, we have a responsibility to
do it. We're trying to improve the system. I'm not
trying to attack the outcome. What we need is a system
where there are only a few of the kinds of the tens of
thousands of complaints that we already have…
Four years ago, when it came time for Congress to
certify the election results, a number of House
members rose to protest the certification of the Bush
electors from Florida. Not a single member of the
Senate joined them. Do you expect the same thing to
happen this time around?
No, I think the Senate is going to go along with an
inquiry this time. I don't think they would embarrass
themselves to let this happen two times in a row…
Have any Republicans actually told you that they
support your efforts?
I'd rather not comment on that.
Are you surprised that none of them have said so
publicly?
No, not really. If you had a majority leader like
theirs, you'd probably think twice about it yourself.
Michael Collins, Scripps Howard News Service: Here's
something that has been largely overlooked amid all of
the complaints about voting irregularities in Ohio
during the Nov. 2 election:
Nearly 97,000 ballots, or 1.7 percent of those cast
across the state, either did not record a preference
for president or could not be counted because the
voter selected more than one presidential candidate.
An analysis by Scripps Howard News Service found
that Ohio recorded the second-highest number of
missing votes in the country, behind California.
Elections experts say a large number of missing votes
in a high-profile race like president should raise a
red flag that something may be amiss.
Bob Fertik. www.democrats.com: Economist/Statistician
Ron Baiman Ph.D., a senior research specialist at the
Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, updated Steve
Freeman's analysis of the exit polls that said Kerry
won. Baiman used the official state-certified results
as of December 7, rather than the immediate
post-election results used by Freeman. But Baiman came
to the same conclusion as Freeman: that the
discrepancies between the exit polls and the actual
results, both in the critical states (OH, PA, and FL)
and nation-wide, are "impossible."
The United States of Ukraine?: Exit Polls Leave Little
Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry
Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the
Popular Vote
by Ron Baiman
December 19, 2004
These unexplained statistical anomalies in the vote
count in critical states, such as Ohio, Florida, and
Pennsylvania, and in the national popular vote for the
2004 Presidential elections, indicate:
a) Implausibly erroneous exit sampling especially for
the national sample and for the most critical states
where one would have expected pollsters to be most
careful, and/or
b) Election fraud and/or discriminatory voter
suppression that resulted in a in an election result
in Ohio, Florida, and other states, and in the
national popular vote outcome, that is contrary to
what would have occurred in a free and fair election.
I conclude that, based on the best exit sample data
currently available, neither the national popular
vote, or many of the certified state election results,
are credible and should not be regarded as a true
reflection of the intent of national electorate, or of
many state voters, until a complete and thorough
investigation of the possibilities a) and b) above is
completed.
These are remarkable words for a scholar - Baiman is
strongly suggesting the Presidency was stolen. The
fact that two experts have come to the same conclusion
is doubly (or is it squared?) significant.
How many experts will have to reach the same
conclusion before the mainstream media touches this
story?
Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., Columbus Free Press:
Three contiguous counties in southwestern Ohio, all
traditionally Republican counties, gave unexpectedly
large margins to George W. Bush over John F. Kerry on
election night. All three counties experienced a huge
increase in voter turnout. In all three counties,
Bush received a higher percentage of the vote than he
did in the 2000 election, and Kerry received a lower
percentage of the vote than Al Gore did in 2000. This
study analyzes how it happened.
In Warren County, the administrative building was
locked down on election night, all in the name of
"homeland security." No independent persons were
allowed to observe the vote count. Compared to 2000,
the population increased by 14.75%, the number of
registered voters increased by 29.66%, voter turnout
increased by 33.55%, Bush’s point spread increased
from 42.24% to 44.58%, and Bush’s victory margin
increased from 29,176 votes to 41,124 votes.
In Clermont County, compared to 2000, the population
increased by 4.39%, the number of registered voters
increased by 10.20%, voter turnout increased by
24.86%, Bush's point spread increased from 37.50% to
41.69%, and Bush's victory margin increased from
26,202 votes to 36,376 votes.
In Butler County, compared to 2000, the population
increased by 3.12%, the number of registered voters
increased by 10.06%, voter turnout increased by
18.18%, Bush's point spread increased from 29.40% to
32.52%, and Bush's victory margin increased from
40,197 votes to 52,550 votes.
These three counties provided to George W. Bush a
victory margin of 130,050 votes, nearly equal to his
statewide margin of 136,483 votes…
I do not believe these numbers. They call into
question both the voter registration data and the
turnout data for all of Clermont County, and the
validity of the vote count itself.
These three counties between them, Butler, Warren, and
Clermont, provided nearly all of George W. Bush’s lead
on election night. They also provided, by far, his
three largest majorities, and the three largest
increases in Bush’s margin of victory among any of the
72 counties that he won. The election results in
Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties should be
challenged, for they call into question the results
for the entire State of Ohio.
Stuart Comstock-Gay, www.tompaine.com: The number of
complaints in Ohio numbers thousands upon
thousands—lines into the hours at polling places;
shortages of poll workers and machines; electronic
voting machines that malfunctioned; voters being
required to show identification even though they were
not first-time mail-in registrants; erroneous purges
of voters from the voter rolls; and voters who
requested absentee ballots but never received them and
were nevertheless barred from voting in person. In
one precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, an electronic
voting system gave George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes
out of a total of 638 votes cast. In addition,
approximately 93,000 ballots were not counted and Ohio
election officials may have improperly disqualified
thousands of 155,000 provisional ballots cast.
Now the problems are escalating. In Hocking County,
Ohio, Deputy Elections Director Sherole Eaton
describes a troubling incident on December 10, three
days before the recount was to begin. An employee of
the Tri Ad company came into the office to check out
the tabulator and computer and prepare voting
officials for the recount, so that “the count would
come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full
hand recount of the county.” He asked which
precincts would be recounted, and made sure to focus
on them. Voting machine expert Doug Jones from the
University of Iowa believes this threatens the
integrity of the entire recount. Now Congressman John
Conyers has asked the FBI to investigate this
incident.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. With the
recount underway, we learn that counties are handling
the process in different ways, depending on the whims
of county officials. Every county was instructed by
the Secretary of State to do a recount of 3 percent of
the votes, followed by a hand recount of every vote if
there any discrepancy appears. Some counties,
however, have said they would do their recounts by
machine only, and not by hand. Some have made space
for observers, and allowed them to review voting polls
and other materials. Some counties have kept
observers—whether from the Green Party, Libertarian
Party, DNC or Republican Party—out of the counting
rooms entirely.
And this only after some elections officials tried to
stop the recount in its tracks. Delaware County sued
NVRI, Cobb and Badnarik, seeking to stop the recount,
even though the law was followed. He said the recount
was too expensive and frivolous. Delaware County has
finally decided to conduct a recount, but only after a
series of hearings.
On January 5, Congress will receive the votes of the
electoral college votes and the election—for all
intents and purposes—will be considered concluded.
Meanwhile the Ohio recount will continue well into
January. As of this writing, results are not in, but
we expect full recounts in many counties…
Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security
Cindy Sheehan’s Open Letter to Time Magazine,
www.tompaine.com: Well let's see. Oh yes. George W.
Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three
more architects of the quagmire that is Iraq.
Thousands of people are dead and Bremer, Tenet and
Franks are given our country's highest civilian award.
What's next?
To top everything off—after it has been proven that
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there were no
ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over 1,300 brave
young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in
ruins— what does Time Magazine do? Names George W.
Bush as its "Man of the Year." The person who betrayed
this country into a needless war and whom I hold
ultimately responsible for my son's death and who was
questionably elected, again, to a second term, is
honored this way by your magazine.
I hope we finally find peace in our world and that our
troops who remain in Iraq are brought home
speedily—after all, there was no reason for our troops
to be there in the first place. No reason for my son
and over 1,300 others to have been taken from their
families. No reason for the infrastructure of Iraq to
be demolished and thousands of Iraqis being killed. No
reason for the notion of a "happy" holiday to be
robbed from my family forever. I hope that our
"leaders" don't invade any other countries which pose
no serious threat to the United States. I hope there
is no draft. I hope that the five people mentioned
here (and many others) will finally be held
responsible for the horrible mistake they got our
country into. I hope that competence is finally
rewarded and incompetence is appropriately punished.
These are my wishes for 2005.
This isn't the first time your magazine has selected a
questionable man for this honor—but it's the first
time it affected my family so personally and so
sorrowfully.
Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security:
Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security
Sierra Club: "Today, the Geneva-based World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that 2004
is on track to be the fourth-hottest year since
record-keeping began in 1861. The WMO added that
global warming trends will lead to increased extreme
weather events.
"While the Bush administration continues to deny the
seriousness of global warming, temperatures continue
to rise and 2004 joins the 10 warmest years on record
- all occuring since 1990. Today's WMO announcement is
further evidence reinforcing the scientific conclusion
that global warming will lead to increased habitat
loss, sea level rise, and shifting weather patterns.
Sir David King, the British government's top
scientist, called global warming 'more serious even
than the threat of terrorism.' In contrast to the
actions of our leading trading partners and the
warnings of the world's leading scientists, the Bush
administration's approach to global warming ranges
from ostrich-like to flat earth.
"Meanwhile, states are taking the initiative in
attacking global warming. California's recently passed
Pavley Law will require automobile makers to reduce
global warming emissions from new cars and light
trucks beginning in 2009. The Pavley Law is a big step
in the right direction because it delivers clean car
choices for consumers, and encourages cost-effective,
currently available technology to reduce global
warming emissions. Seven Northeastern states plan to
implement California law when it is finalized, and
Canada is considering adopting the measures.
Illegitimate, Incompetent & Corrupt: A document
released for the first time today by the American
Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush
issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of
inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in
Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of
other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail
that characterizes methods used by the Defense
Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent
Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises
concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.
"These documents raise grave questions about where
the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately
rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D.
Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide
from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few
low-ranking soldiers."
Complicity of the Corporatist News Media
CNN: An unauthorized radio station in the nation's
capital called for "massive protests" in the week
leading up to the January 20 presidential
inauguration. The station broadcast Wednesday at 1680
AM and identified itself as "Guerrilla Radio, WSQT."
During the identification message, an announcer said,
"WSQT is a project of urban activists in the D.C. area
working on housing issues, homeless issues, issues of
war, issues of occupation both at home and abroad, and
issues of the environment that we all have to live
in." After being tipped by a reporter, an official
with the Federal Communications Commission said
enforcement investigators will try to pinpoint the
transmitter using direction-finding equipment. A man
responding to a request for an interview sent to an
e-mail address that had been mentioned on the radio
told CNN the station uses a homemade transmitter and a
concealed antenna."It's about $40 in parts from Radio
Shack and the Dumpster," he said in a telephone
interview Wednesday afternoon. The caller's voice
sounded similar to the voice heard on the broadcasts
throughout the day. Other programming featured rap
music with urgent, unsettled lyrics that were
generally shouted instead of sung. The station's poor
audio quality made the vocalizations nearly
unintelligible. An unidentified announcer said, "It's
time to say no to Bush and no to a ban on abortions."
The announcer also called on the Supreme Court
justices to "get off your butts" and free people
unfairly imprisoned on drug convictions, and further
stated that "we know you can hear our signal up there,
and all you people in Congress."
John O’Neill Wall of Heroes
Elaine Lafferty, Jessica Segal, MS Magazine: Welcome
to our annual celebration of extraordinary women. As
we recognize these heroes, we find ourselves marveling
at their courage and their commitment to excellence,
to do and be the best for themselves and their
communities and families.
This year, another common thread revealed itself:
These women displayed uncommon determination to
accomplish specific goals that had global
consequences.
So what is heroism anyway? In his 1991 book Rescues:
The Lives of Heroes, the superb writer Michael Lesy
noted that many people committed courageous acts when
their own lives were at a low point or even nearly
lost altogether. But nearly all of Lesy’s profiled
heroes were men. Women’s bravery is different. The
late psychotherapist Dr. Miriam Polster, in her book
Eve’s Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Women,
showed how cultural perspectives exclude unique kinds
of heroism that women have commonly exercised.
So we turn first to our Jersey Girls, the four widows
whose determination to seek the truth led to the
creation of the 9/11 Commission.
“Who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation
as the representatives of the nation themselves?”
asked Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers in
1788. What a different world we occupy today; yet it
was these four modern day women, acting as both
inquisitors and representatives of the nation, who
worked and lobbied and organized to hold our
government accountable. We salute them…
Now called the “Jersey Girls” (thanks to a Bruce
Springsteen cover song), they helped force a reckoning
of what really happened that clear September day when
their husbands went to work in the Twin Towers and
never came home.
Nearly 3,000 people died that day, but government
officials insisted that nothing could have prevented
terrorists who just “got lucky” hijacking airplanes.
Left with seven children among them, the four moms
from the Garden State weren’t convinced, and vowed to
find out the truth…
History will remember that the bestselling 9/11
Commission Report, published this summer, found no
link between al-Qaeda terrorists and Iraq. Yet the
Republican presidential campaign still beat the drums
for the American war in Iraq.
Outraged, the Jersey Girls abandoned their nonpartisan
stance and endorsed Democratic challenger John Kerry,
although two of them had voted for Bush in 2000.
Greeted as heroines on the Democratic campaign trail,
they have been asked to autograph copies of the 9/11
Report.
What’s the lesson in it all? Democracy, the Jersey
Girls say, is hard work.
Restore the Sanctity of the Vote! Restore an
Independent, Aggressive Free Press that Serves the
Public Good, Restore the Republic!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041222/ap_on_re_us/election_poll_data
Michigan Congressman Seeks Exit Poll Data
Wed Dec 22, 7:26 AM ET U.S. National - AP
By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer
NEW YORK - The top Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee (news - web sites) has asked The Associated
Press and five broadcast networks to turn over raw
exit poll data collected on Election Day so that any
discrepancies between the data and the certified
election results can be investigated.
Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) Jr. of
Michigan said in a letter released Tuesday in
Washington that the polling firms that conducted the
polls on behalf of the news organizations, Mitofsky
International and Edison Media Research, had declined
to share the information with the committee.
"Without the raw data, the committee will be severely
handicapped in its efforts to show the need for
serious election reform in the United States," Conyers
said in the letter.
The AP and the five television outlets — ABC, CBS,
NBC, CNN, and Fox — formed a consortium called the
National Election Pool to conduct exit polls for this
year's election after disbanding a previous exit poll
group called the Voter News Service, which had
problems in both the 2000 and 2002 elections.
Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the National Election
Pool and a CNN employee, said the poll data were still
being analyzed and that the group's board would decide
how to release a full report on the data early next
year. "To release any information now would be
incomplete," she said.
Several Web logs carried accounts on the afternoon of
Nov. 2 of what they said were leaked information from
the exit polls showing that Kerry, a Massachusetts
senator, was leading Bush in several battleground
states, including Ohio, and poised for victory.
But Bush, a Republican, beat Kerry by about 119,000
votes in Ohio, winning that state's 20 electoral votes
and putting him over the top in the race. Bush won
re-election with 286 electoral votes to Kerry's 252.
Conyers' letter said the exit poll information could
help determine whether there is evidence "of voting
irregularities that occurred as a result of poor
election practices and intentional voter
disenfranchisement."
The exit polling was conducted for the AP and for ABC,
a unit of The Walt Disney Co.; CBS, a unit of Viacom
Inc.; NBC, a unit of General Electric Co.; CNN, a unit
of Time Warner Inc.; and Fox News, owned by News Corp.
"Like Congressman Conyers, we believe the American
people deserve answers," said Jack Stokes, a spokesman
for the AP. "We want exit polling information to be
made public as soon as it is available, as we
intended. At this time, the data is still being
evaluated for a final report to the National Election
Pool."
Officials from ABC and NBC referred calls for comment
to the National Election Pool, where CNN's Emery
responded for the group. A CBS spokeswoman declined to
comment, and officials at Fox could not be reached.
Earlier this month Kerry asked county election
officials in Ohio to allow his witnesses to inspect
the 92,000 ballots cast in the state in which no vote
for president was recorded.
Despite improvements since 2000, when the presidential
outcome was delayed for weeks by problems counting
ballots in Florida, the nation's voting system remains
a locally administered patchwork whose lack of
national uniformity distinguishes the United States
from many other democracies.
Most complaints have come from Democrats and
third-party candidates, but Republicans and bipartisan
groups have acknowledged problems. The Government
Accountability Office is investigating election
problems. Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record),
R-Ohio and chairman of the House Administration
Committee, will oversee an inquiry next year.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, created in
2002, is also scrutinizing the outcome. It plans to
publish in January the government's first report on
the voting, which will serve as the basis for
congressional recommendations and reforms.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following letter, issued by Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
(D-Mich), calls on the five major television networks
and the Associated Press to release the raw exit poll
data from the 2004 presidential election. The letter
below, acquired by RAW STORY late this afternoon, is a
facsimile; the congressman's office said an actual
image of the letter will not be released until
Wednesday.
The letter was sent to: Anne Sweeney, Co-Chairman,
Media Networks, The Walt Disney Company and President,
Disney-ABC Television Group; Bob Wright, President,
NBC; Gail Berman, President, FOX; Jim Walton
President, CNN; Thomas Curley, President, Associated
Press; and Andrew Heyward, President, CBS.
"As you are aware, the American citizenry has voiced a
collective lack of faith in government to carry out
fair election procedures," Conyers writes. "It is
important that the Judiciary Committee access raw
voter poll data so that discrepancies between those
numbers and certified election results can be
investigated...Without the raw data, the Committee
will be severely handicapped in its efforts to show
the need for serious election reform in the United
States."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122204W.shtml
Investigating Ohio
By Tim Grieve
Salon.com
Tuesday 21 December 2004
Rep. John Conyers isn't ready to declare the election
stolen, but he'll continue to dig into the droves of
complaints - and fight to fix the broken U.S. election
system.
For those who believe that the 2004 election was
stolen by George W. Bush, Karl Rove and an unholy
alliance of party operatives and voting-machine
impresarios, a 75-year-old Democratic congressman from
Detroit has emerged as the last best hope for American
democracy. Almost alone in official Washington, Rep.
John Conyers has insisted that the nation understand -
and then correct - the problems that plagued the 2004
vote.
With little attention from the media and little
support even from members of his own party, Conyers
has launched his own probe of the 2004 election. His
early conclusion: There may not have been an active
conspiracy to suppress the vote and steal the
election, but all those problems in Ohio - the long
lines in Democratic precincts, the voting machines
that may have switched votes, the suspicious actions
of a voting-machine company representative, the
trumped-up concerns about terrorism in Warren County,
the Republican-friendly rulings by the state election
official who also happened to chair the Bush-Cheney
campaign - well, those things didn't all happen by
accident, either.
"You know, orchestrated attempts don't always
require a conspiracy," Conyers told Salon on Monday.
Conyers said that Bush's supporters in Ohio may have
worked to suppress the vote based on cues rather than
orders from party officials. "People get the drift
from other elections and the way [campaign leaders]
talk about how they're going to win the election."
Conyers isn't looking to overturn the election, and
he won't say that the Republicans stole it; coming
from a member of Congress, such an allegation would be
"reckless," he said. But neither is he willing to put
the election of 2004 behind him yet. This is the
second presidential election in a row in which
Republicans have succeeded in suppressing the vote,
Conyers said, and he wants to ensure that the system
is changed so that it won't happen again. He'll
continue his investigation, he'll join the Rev. Jesse
Jackson in a protest rally in Ohio on Jan. 3, and when
the new Congress meets in January he'll push for
further investigation and reform.
Conyers spoke with Salon by phone from Detroit.
Your first public forum on the 2004 election was
called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in
Ohio?" Do you know the answer to that question yet?
Well, dozens and dozens of things went wrong. It
depends on what part of the state we're going to
examine. In Hocking County, a private company accessed
an election machine and altered and tampered with it
in the absence of election observers. It disturbed a
deputy chair of the election in the county so much
that she has given a sworn affidavit that has been
turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
and we're in the process of running that down. But
what about in Cleveland, Ohio? There, thousands of
people claimed that their vote for Kerry was turned
into a vote for Bush. Poll workers made mistakes that
might have cost thousands of votes in Cleveland. And
in Youngstown, machines turned an undetermined number
of Kerry votes into Bush votes as well. Provisional
ballots were thrown out. There were several
conflicting rules. There was mass confusion. In Warren
County, they talked about [the possibility that]
terrorism might close down the election. I mean,
please.
What we're doing, understand, is we're collecting
the complaints, the grievances, the outrages, the
indignities that people suffered, and then we've got
to process them to find out what is valid and what
needs to be further examined and what needs to be
tossed out. It's not like every complaint is one that
has to be counted. What we're trying to do is make the
system better.
Do you believe that there was an orchestrated
attempt to steal the election?
Well, you know, orchestrated attempts don't always
require a conspiracy. People get the drift from other
elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about
how they're going to win the election. When you have
the exit-polling information discrepancies that
occurred in 2004, where the odds of all the swing
states coming in so much stronger for Bush than the
exit polls indicated - they say that that is,
statistically, almost an improbability.
[People] are saying, "No, no, no, that doesn't mean
much." But it means a lot. It feeds this growing,
[but] not provable feeling among millions of Americans
that this was another unfair election.
Do you have that feeling?
Sure, I have a feeling that whenever we can come
across ways to make elections fairer or work better or
improve the process or simplify the regulations or
make voting more available to people who have language
problems or disabilities, we have a responsibility to
do it. We're trying to improve the system. I'm not
trying to attack the outcome. What we need is a system
where there are only a few of the kinds of the tens of
thousands of complaints that we already have.
Do you believe the outcome of the election would
have been different if it had been conducted more
fairly?
I have no way of saying that because this gets into
conjecture. I make one conjecture and somebody else
makes a counter conjecture, and where are we? We're
all, "This is what I think." I'm not as concerned
about what I think as I am about what people told me
went wrong on Election Day that we in Congress,
especially the Judiciary Committee, have the
responsibility to correct.
But is there any real chance that anything will be
corrected? The entire nation was focused on the
problems with the electoral system in 2000, yet very
little seems to have changed. If meaningful reform
didn't come then, how can anyone expect it to come
now?
I thought that the Help America Vote Act would
improve things dramatically. And although it helped in
places, the provisional ballot [process] was
misinterpreted. We couldn't get all these private
companies to come up with a paper trail on their
machines. And with the precinct machines, there was
quite a disparity in the conservative counties in Ohio
as opposed to the Democratic areas where there were
only a few machines.
Republican precincts had plenty of machines, and
people could vote quickly.
Instantly, yeah. And we had people waiting for hours
only miles away.
So what comes of all of this?
First, we've got to collect the complaints. Second,
we've got to investigate them and bring forward the
ones we're willing to stand by. And then we have to
examine how we correct them. There needs to be,
generally stated, more federal regulation over
presidential elections. There are just way too many
differences, from not only state to state but also
county to county.
So far, which complaints are you willing to "stand
by"?
It's not a matter of my claiming ownership over the
complaints. I'm just doing my job. If all of them are
valid, that's what I'm going to present. If half of
them are valid, that's what I'm going to present. I'm
not going forward with complaints that don't reach the
level of believability or credibility.
The complaints you've described in this interview -
do they meet that level of believability and
credibility?
Oh yes, and plenty more reach that level. So we've
got a problem. Many people in the media are saying,
"Look, the election's over, and yes, we had problems."
It's like many people are just taking this. Then we
have the hundreds of thousands of people who are
outraged and supportive of me for carrying on and
trying to make sure we get to the bottom of all these
grievances that have been brought forward.
We've received e-mails from hundreds of those
people, and many of them seem certain that the
election was stolen, or at least that the outcome
would have been different if the election had been
more fair.
Sure.
But you're not there yet.
Well, no, that's not why I'm doing this. I'm not
trying to get there. I'm trying to do the kind of job
that people will say, "I think the congressman and
those working with him are going about this in a
fairly impartial, effective manner" - and not that
they're coming in as thieves trying to upset the
election result. To me, that would not be what I'm in
Congress to do. I mean, I would be doing this if it
were just the reverse. A fair election process applies
to everybody - Democrats and Republicans,
conservatives and liberals alike.
Four years ago, when it came time for Congress to
certify the election results, a number of House
members rose to protest the certification of the Bush
electors from Florida. Not a single member of the
Senate joined them. Do you expect the same thing to
happen this time around?
No, I think the Senate is going to go along with an
inquiry this time. I don't think they would embarrass
themselves to let this happen two times in a row.
Has any senator said to you that he or she will call
for an inquiry?
No, I haven't talked with a single one. I'm not
citing somebody who I know is going to do it. I'm not
aware of anyone. I just don't think the Senate would
get caught in that position.
You haven't exactly enjoyed a groundswell of support
from other members of Congress. Are there Democrats in
Congress who support what you're doing but won't come
forward and say so publicly?
Well, there are Republicans who support what I'm
doing who haven't been willing to come forward. Look,
calling for fair elections is not the most radical
thing in the world. We're not positing some
revolutionary theory here. We're asking that the
people who complained be given a fair hearing.
Have any Republicans actually told you that they
support your efforts?
I'd rather not comment on that.
Are you surprised that none of them have said so
publicly?
No, not really. If you had a majority leader like
theirs, you'd probably think twice about it yourself.
What about the Democratic leadership? Harry Reid,
the new Senate minority leader, says he'd rather dance
with Bush than fight him. Should the problems in Ohio
change the way Democrats in Congress think about
accommodating Bush in his second term?
Well, I'm not sure how much accommodation is going
to happen. I listen to Bush talking about "reaching
out," which he talked about the first time, and we had
the most divided federal system in memory. And now
those kinds of phrases are being tossed about during
the Christmas holiday again. Please. I don't put much
stock in it.
Bush billed himself as a "uniter, not a divider."
I keep reminding myself of what he said. He sure
didn't unite anybody I knew of.
And what about John Kerry? Have you spoken with him
about your investigation?
His lawyer was in Columbus for our hearing there
last week. And he has also, at the same time, asked
for a full recount in Delaware County [Ohio].
Has the Kerry campaign done enough? A lot of
Democrats think Kerry conceded too soon.
It's easy to be in an armchair somewhere saying,
"You've got to do this; you've got to do that." He had
more in his control. And besides, he's the candidate.
I wish he'd listened to me more, and everybody wishes
that the guy they voted for would listen to them more.
But he's the master of his ship.
When you say that you wish Kerry had listened to you
more, do you mean during the campaign or in the days
after the election?
During the campaign and after.
What do you wish he were doing now?
I don't want to go into all of this "shoulda,
coulda, woulda." I think it takes our focus off the
fact that we had far too many grievances and misfires
in this election that have to be corrected.
But you don't believe that those problems were the
result of a concerted effort by the Republican Party
or the Bush-Cheney campaign? You think people who
wanted to see the president reelected just got the
message somehow that they were supposed to do the
things they did?
People didn't have to get a message. If you use
questionable tactics and generally attempt to suppress
the vote - that's what the Republicans' strategies
were all about: "How do we limit the vote?" Because
the more people who voted, the more imperiled they
felt they would be. And from that kind of an
assumption, you can get a whole lot of activities that
might not meet the smell test.
Because people on the ground understand the overall
strategy and then take it upon themselves to engage in
whatever conduct they think will help?
That's what frequently happens, and usually does.
Do you believe that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell did that? Do you think he acted with the
intent to suppress the vote?
I know that Kenneth Blackwell made some decisions
that were blatant and outrageous for a secretary of
state. How he felt that his head was big enough to be
chairman of the "Re-elect Bush" committee and also
head of the administration of the electoral vote for
the president in that same state was beyond me.
Is that the sort of issue that you hope to address
through legislative reform?
Oh, good night, yeah. There are very few people who
did what he did.
Do you think you'll ever be able to prove that there
was a coordinated effort to steal the election?
We're not trying to prove that. This is what we're
discussing: We're trying to improve the situation
wherever we can to make a better voting system in the
states.
But a lot of the people who support your efforts
desperately want you to prove that there was a
conspiracy. If the e-mails we get are any indication,
a lot of them believe that the existence of a
conspiracy has already been proven.
Well, you know, a citizen's point of view may be
different from a federal lawmaker's point of view. The
citizens are entitled to form their own opinions. They
can assert that easily. A member of Congress, the
ranking member of Judiciary ... I can't make those
assertions without proof. That would be reckless.
So you don't make them.
No, I don't.
What do you do?
We pass laws. We make laws and we try to correct the
system through the legislative process.
And what conclusions have you reached about how the
system can be fixed?
Everyone is beginning to reexamine the
appropriateness of the Electoral College. We realize
that provisional balloting needs to be streamlined and
simplified. We know that there should be paper trails
in computers. We're beginning to wonder if we haven't
privatized the electoral system so that the computer
tabulators can do more and know more than the
electoral commissions of the counties themselves.
In the meantime, what do you say to all of the
people who believe in their hearts that our democracy
is broken and that the election was stolen?
I ask and invite everybody to turn in any evidence
that they want that helps proves whatever position
they believe, or even a position they don't believe.
But this isn't a hunch and suspicion game. This is
very serious business. Either there were defects so
numerous and so plentiful that we had a faulty
election, or we had an election that had these defects
[but they didn't alter the outcome of the election].
And as we go forward with trying to improve the
process, my whole objective is not to change the
election result but to try to improve the process
itself.
-------
Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San
Francisco.
-------
Jump to TO Features for Wednesday December 22, 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122404Z.shtml
In Ohio, Almost 1 in 50 Votes for President Don't
Count
By Michael Collins
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday 22 December 2004
Here's something that has been largely overlooked
amid all of the complaints about voting irregularities
in Ohio during the Nov. 2 election:
Nearly 97,000 ballots, or 1.7 percent of those cast
across the state, either did not record a preference
for president or could not be counted because the
voter selected more than one presidential candidate.
An analysis by Scripps Howard News Service found
that Ohio recorded the second-highest number of
missing votes in the country, behind California.
Elections experts say a large number of missing votes
in a high-profile race like president should raise a
red flag that something may be amiss.
Secretary of State Ken Blackwell said it's difficult
to know what happened because the numbers don't
include a breakdown of how many voters simply chose
not to vote for president or how many picked more than
one presidential candidate.
But he said the data reinforces his belief that the
state must move away from punch-card ballots and
toward electronic machines that prevent voters from
picking more than one candidate in the same race.
Voters in 68 of Ohio's 88 counties used punch-card
ballots in November. Electronic voting machinery must
be in place in every county in Ohio by May 2006.
On the other hand, Blackwell said, some voters
probably chose not to vote for president because they
didn't like either of the major candidates on the
ballot.
"Given human nature, when you're talking about 5.8
million people casting a vote, it wouldn't be too
far-fetched to think that you have a small percentage
of people who would say, 'A pox on both of your
houses,' " Blackwell said.
"I just hear, as I crisscross the state talking with
voters, some people don't think they have a clear
choice and they think it's (between) tweedledee and
tweedledum. Sometimes they just take a pass and focus
on those issues and candidates that they know and that
they see have a clear difference."
The number of missing votes in Ohio increased over
the last presidential election. This year, there were
96,580 missing votes, compared to 93,991 four years
ago. Blackwell attributed the increase to the fact
that nearly 1 million more voters cast ballots in this
year's contest than four years ago.
As for percentages, the number of missing votes in
Ohio actually declined. Four years ago, 2 percent of
all ballots cast in Ohio did not register a vote for
president or could not be counted because of
double-voting. This year, that number dropped to 1.7
percent.
The three Ohio counties with the highest percentage
of missing votes were Coshocton County, where 1,365
ballots, or nearly 8 percent of all ballots cast, did
not register a vote for president; Van Wert County,
which reported 698 missing votes, or 4.5 percent; and
Holmes County, which had 570 missing votes, or 4.48
percent.
Mary A. Fry, director of the Coshocton County Board
of Elections, attributed the number of missing votes
in her county to a mental health issue that was on the
ballot. Voters were asked to approve a property tax
levy on which the proceeds would go to mental health
programs in the county.
"A lot of people voted on a mental health issue and
nothing else," she said.
In Van Wert County, elections officials said the
problem could be traced largely to a voting machine in
one precinct. Some 400 votes had to be thrown out
after elections workers in one precinct borrowed a
punch-card reader from another precinct.
The order in which candidate names appear on the
ballot in Ohio is rotated from one political
jurisdiction to another. But elections workers forgot
to rotate the ballot when they borrowed the punch-card
reader in Van Wert County, making it impossible to
determine which presidential candidate the voter was
trying to vote for, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for
the Secretary of State's office.
Holmes County traditionally has a high number of
missing votes because the county has a large Amish
population, said Lisa Welch, director of the Holmes
County Board of Elections.
"Traditionally, our Amish do not vote on candidates,
they only vote on issues," Welch said. "They do not
feel it's their right to judge men."
-------
http://blog.democrats.com/exitpoll
Stolen Election 2004: Were the Exit Polls Wrong or
Right? Let's Poll the Pollsters!
by Bob Fertik on 12/20/2004 10:47pm. - revised
12/21/2004 10:59pm
Economist/Statistician Ron Baiman Ph.D., a senior
research specialist at the Institute of Government and
Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, updated Steve Freeman's analysis of the exit
polls that said Kerry won. Baiman used the official
state-certified results as of December 7, rather than
the immediate post-election results used by Freeman.
But Baiman came to the same conclusion as Freeman:
that the discrepancies between the exit polls and the
actual results, both in the critical states (OH, PA,
and FL) and nation-wide, are "impossible."
The United States of Ukraine?: Exit Polls Leave Little
Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry
Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the
Popular Vote
by Ron Baiman
December 19, 2004
These unexplained statistical anomalies in the vote
count in critical states, such as Ohio, Florida, and
Pennsylvania, and in the national popular vote for the
2004 Presidential elections, indicate:
a) Implausibly erroneous exit sampling especially for
the national sample and for the most critical states
where one would have expected pollsters to be most
careful, and/or
b) Election fraud and/or discriminatory voter
suppression that resulted in a in an election result
in Ohio, Florida, and other states, and in the
national popular vote outcome, that is contrary to
what would have occurred in a free and fair election.
I conclude that, based on the best exit sample data
currently available, neither the national popular
vote, or many of the certified state election results,
are credible and should not be regarded as a true
reflection of the intent of national electorate, or of
many state voters, until a complete and thorough
investigation of the possibilities a) and b) above is
completed.
These are remarkable words for a scholar - Baiman is
strongly suggesting the Presidency was stolen. The
fact that two experts have come to the same conclusion
is doubly (or is it squared?) significant.
How many experts will have to reach the same
conclusion before the mainstream media touches this
story?
This is not a rhetorical question. I'm mad as hell and
I'm not gonna take it any more. I want serious answers
- and I need your help to get them.
I want direct answers to this question, and I will
post them all here at http://democrats.com/exitpoll
Two scholars - Profs. Steve Freeman and Ron Baiman -
analyzed the differences between the unadjusted exit
poll results and the election results reported by
election officials. Both scholars concluded the
results in the 3 key states - Ohio, Florida, and
Pennsylvania - were so far outside the margin of error
as to be impossible. The same is true for the
nationwide results. They conclude that either a) the
exit poll techniques were seriously wrong - which they
consider highly unlikely - or b) the reported election
results were seriously wrong and John Kerry actually
won. Do you agree with their analysis, and do you
think the problem was a) or b) ?
Help me find the direct web link to each organization
(preferably the page devoted to election polls) and
the top person, including the name, phone, and e-mail
(or webform). Send me the info via our webform
(http://democrats.com/contact) and I will post it as
quickly as I can. While you're collecting the info,
submit the question above and if you make contact
before I do you can handle the follow up
correspondence.
Let's make some news - and maybe make some history
too!
A. 2004 Exit pollsters
Edison Media Research - Larry Rosin, President -
908.707.4707 - info at edisonresearch.com
Mitofsky International - Warren Mitofsky - 212
980-3031 mitofsky at mindspring.com
Roper Center - Harry O'Neill -
rcweb at ropercenter.uconn.edu
B. 2004 Exit Poll sponsors (request for raw data from
Rep. John Conyers)
ABC/Disney - Anne Sweeney, President
AP - Thomas Curley, President
CBS - Andrew Heyward, President
CNN - Jim Walton, President
FOX - Gail Berman, President
NBC - Bob Wright, President
C. Poll bloggers
DonkeyRising - Ruy Teixeira
MyDD - Jerome Armstrong/Chris Bowers
Mysterypollster - Mark Blumenthal
12/14/04 Exits: Were They Really "Wrong?"
Blames polling error, citing an internal NEP review of
1,400 sample precincts showed Kerry's share of the
vote overstated by an average of 1.9 percentage points
PollingReport - editor at pollingreport.com
PollKatz - Stuart Eugene Thiel -
self at stuarteugenethiel.com
William Kaminsky
12/11/04 Systematic Voting Fraud or Systematic Exit
Polling Bias?
Blames poll bias of 3.7%-3.9%, most likely due to
Republican hatred of the media (and their exit
pollsters).
"I'd still be very curious to hear pollsters
explicitly account for why the bias was so large,
because nearly 4% bias is pretty darn big for a
professional polling organization. If I were a paying
customer of Edison Media Services and Mitofsky
International like ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, et cetera, I'd
be plenty PO'ed."
D. Media pollsters
Field - E. Deborah Jay, CEO - 415-392-5763
info at field.com
Gallup
Harris Interactive
Ipsos/Cook
Marist - Lee Miringoff, Director - 845-575-5050
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1012
Election 2004
Election results in Southwestern Ohio
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
December 21, 2004
Three contiguous counties in southwestern Ohio, all
traditionally Republican counties, gave unexpectedly
large margins to George W. Bush over John F. Kerry on
election night. All three counties experienced a huge
increase in voter turnout. In all three counties,
Bush received a higher percentage of the vote than he
did in the 2000 election, and Kerry received a lower
percentage of the vote than Al Gore did in 2000. This
study analyzes how it happened.
In Warren County, the administrative building was
locked down on election night, all in the name of
"homeland security." No independent persons were
allowed to observe the vote count. Compared to 2000,
the population increased by 14.75%, the number of
registered voters increased by 29.66%, voter turnout
increased by 33.55%, Bush’s point spread increased
from 42.24% to 44.58%, and Bush’s victory margin
increased from 29,176 votes to 41,124 votes.
In Clermont County, compared to 2000, the population
increased by 4.39%, the number of registered voters
increased by 10.20%, voter turnout increased by
24.86%, Bush's point spread increased from 37.50% to
41.69%, and Bush's victory margin increased from
26,202 votes to 36,376 votes.
In Butler County, compared to 2000, the population
increased by 3.12%, the number of registered voters
increased by 10.06%, voter turnout increased by
18.18%, Bush's point spread increased from 29.40% to
32.52%, and Bush's victory margin increased from
40,197 votes to 52,550 votes.
These three counties provided to George W. Bush a
victory margin of 130,050 votes, nearly equal to his
statewide margin of 136,483 votes.
All the above data are figures provided on election
night. It is preferable, when making comparisons, to
use synoptic data, and as of this writing, not all
counties have finalized their vote count.
To analyze how the Republicans achieved their
impressive victory margins, I have compared the
results of the 2004 and 2000 presidential elections.
Tables of data are arranged by city or township,
showing vote totals for the candidates, pluralities,
gains or losses, and the difference between the
margins of 2004 and 2000. In this way it can be
readily seen where the victory margins came from.
BUTLER COUNTY
St. Clair Township + 523
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 1,877 1,008 869
2000 1,466 1,120 346
Change 411 - 112 523
These election results are not credible. Voter
turnout was up substantially (8.27%), yet Kerry got
10% fewer votes than Gore. Exactly.
Precinct Bush Kerry Bush Gore
4KA 217 173 152 213
4KB 224 125 186 104
4KC 210 104 148 126
4KD 235 119 181 129
4KE 224 128 191 146
4KF 294 171 231 188
4KG 94 36 92 50
4KH 379 152 285 164
In fact, Kerry is reported to have received fewer
votes than Gore in 7 of 8 precincts in St. Clair
Township. Only Precinct 4KB appears realistic when
compared with the 2000 results.
Liberty Township + 3,078
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 11,629 3,404 8,225
2000 7,619 2,472 5,147
Change 4,010 932 3,078
Liberty Township accounted for 24.9% of the reported
increase in Bush’s margin of victory in Butler County.
Compared to 2000 there was reportedly a 41.02%
increase in voter registration and a 46.43% increase
in voter turnout. Upon closer examination these
numbers are not credible.
The increase in voter registration, as a percentage,
is wildly distributed throughout the township. There
are 20 precincts in Liberty Township, including one,
Precinct 4DT, that did not exist in 2000. There were
11 precincts with less than a 30% increase in voter
registration, 9 with less than 20%, 5 with less than
10%, and two that actually suffered a loss. Bush’s
net gain in these 11 precincts was 571 votes. His big
gains came in the 9 precincts with more than a 30%
increase in voter registration:
Prec. Regis. Bush Kerry Bush Gore Net Gain
4DA + 52.1% 632 161 423 89 + 137
4DB + 33.8% 727 229 547 186 + 137
4DC + 64.5% 635 201 360 117 + 191
4DF + 34.0% 723 158 511 131 + 185
4DG + 43.3% 704 185 505 129 + 143
4DI +177.9% 1,220 288 413 118 + 637
4DO +143.5% 979 270 358 96 + 447
4DP + 34.3% 600 181 431 143 + 131
4DT N.A. 676 177 N.A. N.A. + 499
Look at these numbers. In Precinct 4DI, the number of
registered voters rose from 660 to 1,834. Bush’s
share of the increased vote was 807 to 170, a net gain
of 637 votes. In Precinct 4DO, the number of
registered voters rose from 596 to 1,451. Bush’s
share of the increase was 621 votes to 174 for Kerry,
a net gain of 447 votes. In Precinct 4DT, the brand
new one, Bush’s net gain was 499 votes. In these
three precincts alone, Bush enjoyed a net gain of
1,583 votes, 51.43% of his net increase for the entire
township, and 12.81% of his net increase for the
entire county. Altogether these 9 precincts gave Bush
a net gain of 2,507 votes. Or so they say.
Monroe City + 782
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 3,399 1,401 1,998
2000 2,303 1,087 1,216
Change 1,096 314 782
In Monroe City the increase in voter registration, as
a percentage, is also unevenly distributed.
Prec. Regis. Bush Kerry Bush Gore Net Gain
4CA + 65.5% 496 219 272 138 + 143
4CB + 0.7% 461 188 395 198 + 76
4CC + 9.9% 604 216 511 209 + 86
5CA + 38.8% 560 227 336 164 + 161
5CB + 48.2% 279 129 176 80 + 54
5CC - 2.4% 272 102 229 109 + 50
5CD + 69.3% 727 320 384 189 + 212
Massive increases in the voter rolls in 4 of 7
precincts accounted for 72.3% of Bush’s net gain in
Monroe City. The records will show whether or not
these huge increases are real. In 2 of the other 3
precincts, Kerry got fewer votes than Gore even though
voter turnout was up sharply.
Trenton City + 785
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 3,153 1,510 1,643
2000 2,088 1,230 858
Change 1,065 280 785
In Trenton City the increase in voter registration is
more evenly distributed, ranging from 7.08% to 36.94%
among 7 precincts; and the net gains for George W.
Bush are more evenly distributed, ranging from 81
votes to 170 votes among 7 precincts. The proof that
the numbers are untrue is the distribution of votes
among the candidates:
Prec. Badnarik Bush Kerry Petrouka
4EA 2 464 249 0
4EB 2 661 272 0
4EC 2 373 191 0
4ED 3 395 248 1
5EA 30 284 115 0
5EB 0 468 243 0
5EC 2 508 192 2
Total 41 3,153 1,510 3
In Precinct 5EA, the only one of 7 precincts in which
John Kerry was awarded fewer votes than Al Gore (22
fewer, to be exact), 30 votes have been shifted to the
column of Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate.
There are 289 precincts in Butler County. Badnarik
received 396 votes county wide, no more than 6 in any
other precinct, yet 30 votes appear in his column in
this one precinct in Trenton City. This is the very
same pattern of election fraud that appears 11 times,
on a larger scale, in the canvass reports for
Cleveland. See “Stealing Votes in Cleveland,” at
freepress.org/images/columns/steal_cleveland.pdf
Ross Township + 512
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 2,830 927 1,903
2000 2,206 815 1,391
Change 624 112 512
In Ross Township, George W. Bush received 64.1% of his
net gain in 3 precincts (4JA, 4JB, 4JE) where,
altogether, Kerry received fewer votes than Gore:
Prec. Turnout Bush Kerry Bush Gore Net Gain
4JA + 24.3% 447 120 330 116 + 113
4JB + 28.3% 537 138 389 128 + 138
4JC + 50.2% 549 197 373 118 + 97
4JD + 18.1% 464 125 403 98 + 34
4JE + 4.4% 183 67 135 96 + 77
4JF + 11.9% 400 190 352 162 + 20
4JG + 3.0% 250 90 224 97 + 33
Look at these numbers. In these 3 precincts, voter
turnout was up by 22.1%. Bush’s share of the increase
was 313 votes to a loss of 15 votes for Kerry. In the
rest of Ross Township, where voter turnout was up by
22.3%, Bush’s share of the increase was 311 votes to
127 for Kerry. These vote totals, all within the same
township, are inconsistent.
Hanover Township + 555
Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 3,262 1,197 2,065
2000 2,752 1,242 1,510
Change 510 -45 555
In Hanover Township the precinct lines have been
redrawn during the last four years, making a precinct
by precinct comparison impossible. But look at these
numbers. Voter turnout was up 8.8%, from 4,170 to
4,537. Bush gained 510 votes, and Kerry received 45
fewer votes than Gore. These numbers are suspect.
St. Clair Township, Liberty Township, Monroe City,
Trenton City, Ross Township, and Hanover Township
account for 50.47% of the increase in Bush’s margin of
victory in Butler County. There are enough
statistical irregularities in the canvass sheets to
warrant examination of the voting records and close
scrutiny during the recount.
WARREN COUNTY
There would be no easier county in Ohio in which to
hack election results than Warren County. Unlike all
other counties in the state, the canvass records of
Warren County are not organized geographically. Not
even the sum totals for cities and townships can be
compared because the place names in the 2004 canvass
records are not the same as they were in 2000. The
names of the precincts are in code, and they appear on
the canvass sheets in a fixed but random order. Only
a sleuth would rearrange them into cities and
townships, which, of course, is what I have done.
Once the data are presented in a sensible format, the
voter registration data is not as irregular as it
appears when presented by the Board of Elections. The
constantly changing precinct boundaries make data
presented in that manner almost indecipherable.
Still, when the data are combined according to cities,
villages and townships, it can be seen that the
increase in voter registration since 2000 ranged from
7.7% in Morrow Village to 79.0% in Hamilton Township,
and was 29.66% county wide, which is more than double
the population increase of 14.75%.
George W. Bush carried Warren County by 41,992 votes,
an increase of 12,816 over his plurality in 2000.
Most of his plurality (28,869 votes, or 68.75%) and
most of the increase in his margin of victory (9,047
votes, or 70.59%) came in six cities and townships:
Lebanon City + 1,324
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 11,641 5,956 2,278 3,678
2000 8,795 4,011 1,657 2,354
Change +32.4% 1,945 621 1,324
Mason City + 2,009
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 19,221 10,858 3,805 7,053
2000 13,899 7,653 2,609 5,044
Change +38.3% 3,205 1,196 2,009
Springboro City + 1,321
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 10,447 5,985 2,189 3,796
2000 8,139 4,230 1,755 2,475
Change +28.4% 1,755 434 1,321
Clear Creek Township + 1,104
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 8,145 4,997 1,574 3,423
2000 6,177 3,503 1,184 2,319
Change +31.9% 1,494 390 1,104
Deerfield Township + 1,365
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 21,220 11,319 4,529 6,790
2000 16,359 8,527 3,102 5,425
Change +29.7% 2,792 1,427 1,365
Hamilton Township + 1,924
Reg. Rep. Dem. Plur.
2004 10,681 6,226 2,097 4,129
2000 5,967 3,399 1,194 2,205
Change +79.0% 2,827 903 1,924
In Lebanon City, Springboro City, Clear Creek
Township, and Hamilton Township, Bush’s point spread
over his opponent actually increased. If the Warren
County results were hacked, as many people suspect,
then these would be the places to look:
Bush Kerry Bush Gore
Lebanon City 72.04 27.55 68.83 28.44
Mason City 73.86 25.88 72.99 24.88
Springboro City 73.04 26.71 69.39 28.79
Clear Creek Township 75.77 23.87 72.62 24.54
Deerfield Township 71.19 28.49 71.77 26.11
Hamilton Township 74.55 25.11 72.17 25.35
There was a dramatic increase in voter registration
since the primary election of March 2, 2004, as
described in my previous paper, “Voter Turnout in
Warren County.” These cities and townships were no
exceptions:
VOTER REGISTRATION: 11/07/00 03/02/04 11/02/04
Lebanon City 8,795 10,026 11,641
Mason City 13,899 16,728 19,221
Springboro City 8,139 9,220 10,447
Clear Creek Township 6,177 7,121 8,145
Deerfield Township 16,359 18,144 21,220
Hamilton Township 5,967 8,426 10,681
Thus, in the four years since the 2000 presidential
election, these six cities and townships added 22,019
new voters to the rolls: 10,329 in the first 40
months, and 11,690 in the last 8 months. This is
entirely possible in a fast-growing county. Only a
careful examination and comparison of the voter rolls
and registration forms can determine its legitimacy.
CLERMONT COUNTY
The best way to illustrate what happened in Clermont
County is to begin by presenting two tables, showing
very different voting patterns in two townships.
Tate Township
Registered Voters Turnout
2000 2004 Change 2000 2004 Bush Kerry Bush Gore
A 502 517 + 2.9% 68.7 72.9 270 105 226 109
B 401 411 + 2.5% 51.1 58.9 167 71 131 69
C 451 480 + 6.4% 69.4 76.3 263 93 226 76
D 458 512 +11.8% 68.3 74.2 272 102 217 87
E 309 313 + 1.3% 70.2 77.3 169 68 131 82
F 353 370 + 4.8% 61.8 72.7 211 56 146 68
G 394 459 +16.5% 73.4 78.9 271 88 221 61
H 707 772 + 9.2% 65.6 76.0 415 167 320 129
I 403 423 + 5.0% 62.3 72.1 201 99 172 71
3978 4257 + 7.0% 65.7 73.5 2239 849 1790 752
Every precinct in Tate Township reported a modest
increase in voter registration, quite in line with the
10.2% increase county wide. It was the voter turnout,
up by 7.8%, which translated into a big win for Bush.
Excluding third-party candidates, there were 546 more
votes cast for president in 2004 than in 2000. Bush
got 449 of them, and Kerry got 97.
Batavia Township
Registered Voters Turnout
2000 2004 Change 2000 2004 Bush Kerry Bush Gore
A 987 1263 +28.0% 59.3 66.3 594 232 412 161
B 560 1038 +85.4% 61.3 63.7 422 233 217 122
C 901 993 +10.2% 54.3 66.9 466 190 321 157
D 828 1061 +28.1% 66.2 70.8 557 189 385 157
E 559 937 +67.6% 53.1 70.4 452 202 170 112
F 444 503 +13.3% 56.8 72.6 247 115 141 103
G 702 930 +32.5% 64.0 72.3 451 214 298 136
H 468 583 +24.6% 71.6 79.6 337 121 233 92
I 567 287 -49.4% 44.6 81.2 180 52 167 79
J 679 938 +38.1% 69.5 76.9 516 195 325 134
K 1006 1269 +26.1% 60.7 68.4 645 215 431 166
L 675 592 -12.3% 59.1 63.0 222 149 232 164
8376 10394 +24.1% 59.9 69.9 5089 2107 3332 1583
In Batavia Township the voter registration rates are
unbelievable. The increase is said to be 24.1% for
the entire township, compared to 9.1% elsewhere in the
county. The increases range as high as 67.6% in
Precinct E, where 378 new voters were registered. It
appears that nearly all of them voted. Turnout is
said to have increased by 17.3%. Excluding
third-party candidates, there were 372 more votes cast
for president in 2004 than in 2000 in Precinct E
alone. Bush got 282 of them, and Kerry got 90. On
the other hand, decreases in voter registration rates
range as high as 49.4% in Precinct I, where 280 voters
were lost from the rolls. Nearly all the 313 people
who failed to vote in 2000 either died or moved away.
And yet, miraculously, excluding third-party
candidates, only 14 fewer votes were cast for
president in 2004 than in 2000. Bush managed to gain
13 votes in Precinct I, while the Democrats lost 27,
ostensibly because voter turnout increased by 36.6%.
There are 23 such precincts in Clermont County, where
turnout was up, but Kerry got fewer votes than Gore.
I do not believe these numbers. They call into
question both the voter registration data and the
turnout data for all of Clermont County, and the
validity of the vote count itself.
These three counties between them, Butler, Warren, and
Clermont, provided nearly all of George W. Bush’s lead
on election night. They also provided, by far, his
three largest majorities, and the three largest
increases in Bush’s margin of victory among any of the
72 counties that he won. The election results in
Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties should be
challenged, for they call into question the results
for the entire State of Ohio.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122204X.shtml
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/ohio_a_crime_against_democracy.php
Ohio: A Crime Against Democracy
Stuart Comstock-Gay
December 21, 2004
The Bush electors in Ohio have cast their votes, even
though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly
gave them standing as electors have not been
recounted. When asked, the mainstream media will admit
that there were rampant problems with this election.
But there's no juicy story for them to cover because
they don't believe a recount would change the outcome
of the election. Thus, they neglect what's happening
in Ohio. Here Comstock-Gay explains why it matters.
For the best of TomPaine.com's coverage of the
problems with election 2004, click here.
Stuart Comstock-Gay is executive director of the
National Voting Rights Institute.
Electoral votes have been submitted by all states and
the national news media has moved on, but a test of
U.S. voting rights continues in Ohio. After the Ohio
delegation to the Electoral College cast its votes for
President Bush last week, election officials in Ohio
counties began the recount of votes cast in the
election. Concerns about the integrity of the 2004
election continue to surface. Something's wrong with
this picture.
We at the National Voting Rights Institute—on behalf
of Green Party Candidate David Cobb and Libertarian
Party candidate Michael Badnarik—are providing legal
representation in the recount effort. We also want to
find out what went wrong. Because clearly things went
wrong. And whether in the end they are serious enough
to change the outcome of the election, they create a
cloud over the elections of 2004.
Too many commentators continue to claim the recount
effort is the result of bad losers. Some have even
gone so far as to say that if the Republicans lost,
there would be no recount—that Republicans “play
fair.” In fact, concern about "fairness" is in part
what is driving the recount. These commentators
overlook the fact that this effort is not only about
verifying the outcome of the vote. More importantly,
it’s about ensuring accountability of a highly
fallible elections process.
As long as any votes are miscounted, misplaced or
misdirected, our elections cannot be said to be
properly working. And with an electoral system that
provides no consistency in how votes are counted—and
some election officials hostile to a full accounting—
there remains work to be done to restore voters' faith
in the system.
What Went Wrong On Nov. 2
The number of complaints in Ohio numbers thousands
upon thousands—lines into the hours at polling places;
shortages of poll workers and machines; electronic
voting machines that malfunctioned; voters being
required to show identification even though they were
not first-time mail-in registrants; erroneous purges
of voters from the voter rolls; and voters who
requested absentee ballots but never received them and
were nevertheless barred from voting in person. In
one precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, an electronic
voting system gave George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes
out of a total of 638 votes cast. In addition,
approximately 93,000 ballots were not counted and Ohio
election officials may have improperly disqualified
thousands of 155,000 provisional ballots cast.
Now the problems are escalating. In Hocking County,
Ohio, Deputy Elections Director Sherole Eaton
describes a troubling incident on December 10, three
days before the recount was to begin. An employee of
the Tri Ad company came into the office to check out
the tabulator and computer and prepare voting
officials for the recount, so that “the count would
come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full
hand recount of the county.” He asked which
precincts would be recounted, and made sure to focus
on them. Voting machine expert Doug Jones from the
University of Iowa believes this threatens the
integrity of the entire recount. Now Congressman John
Conyers has asked the FBI to investigate this
incident.
What’s Going Wrong With The Recount
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. With the
recount underway, we learn that counties are handling
the process in different ways, depending on the whims
of county officials. Every county was instructed by
the Secretary of State to do a recount of 3 percent of
the votes, followed by a hand recount of every vote if
there any discrepancy appears. Some counties,
however, have said they would do their recounts by
machine only, and not by hand. Some have made space
for observers, and allowed them to review voting polls
and other materials. Some counties have kept
observers—whether from the Green Party, Libertarian
Party, DNC or Republican Party—out of the counting
rooms entirely.
And this only after some elections officials tried to
stop the recount in its tracks. Delaware County sued
NVRI, Cobb and Badnarik, seeking to stop the recount,
even though the law was followed. He said the recount
was too expensive and frivolous. Delaware County has
finally decided to conduct a recount, but only after a
series of hearings.
On January 5, Congress will receive the votes of the
electoral college votes and the election—for all
intents and purposes—will be considered concluded.
Meanwhile the Ohio recount will continue well into
January. As of this writing, results are not in, but
we expect full recounts in many counties.
It is shocking that the cherished right to vote, which
should be a major issue in this country, has become an
invisible one. Even in the Ukraine, there will be a
new election because of widespread irregularities in
the presidential election. As the Supreme Court stated
over a century ago, the right to vote is "a
fundamental political right, because preservative of
all rights." Now, more than ever, we must fight for
this right.
http://blog.democrats.com/node/2086
Stolen Election 2004: Wednesday Update
by Bob Fertik on 12/22/2004 12:03am. - revised
12/22/2004 12:56am
The Ohio recount is coming to an end, and the Green
Party has documented numerous significant problems,
especially the refusal to choose random precincts for
the 3% handcount.
Other problems with the recount include:
No review of the approximate 93,000 "spoiled" or
"discarded" ballots;
Official recount observers being prevented from
getting close enough to see the ballots or observe log
books or portions of the process in Lucas and Cuyahoga
counties;
Lack of adequate security for ballots or voting
machines in Hocking, Coshocton, Medina and Greene
Counties;
Counties, including Monroe and Fairfield, which
refused to do a full hand recount, as required by law,
when the 3% sampling did not match the machine count;
Mistreatment of official observers, including
disparaging comments made in a number of counties by
election officials and employees; observers being told
they couldn't ask questions and, in Summit County,
observers being forced to stand against a wall for the
duration of the recount.
"Mountains of evidence have documented the voter
suppression, intimidation and disenfranchisement which
took place in Ohio on Election Day. Secretary of State
Blackwell labeled these deeply troubling problems as
'glitches.' He appears to be similarly unconcerned
that the Ohio recount is being conducted without
uniform standards and in apparent violation of Ohio
law," said Cobb-LaMarche Media Director Blair Bobier.
While Blackwell is eager to cover up Stolen Election
2004, Rep. John Conyers is determined to get to the
bottom of it.
Conyers is very interested in the exit poll
discrepancy that Democrats.com is investigating. On
Tuesday, he sent a letter to the Presidents of the TV
networks and the AP requesting the raw data from the
November 2 exit poll.
"As you are aware, the American citizenry has voiced a
collective lack of faith in government to carry out
fair election procedures," Conyers writes. "It is
important that the Judiciary Committee access raw
voter poll data so that discrepancies between those
numbers and certified election results can be
investigated...Without the raw data, the Committee
will be severely handicapped in its efforts to show
the need for serious election reform in the United
States."
You GO, Conyers!
Conyers also gave a long interview to Salon's Tim
Grieve (copied here), in which he refused to draw any
conclusions on whether the election was stolen, or
whether there was an explicit conspiracy to steal it.
But if he doesn't see the "fire" yet, he certainly
sees lots of "smoke."
Well, you know, orchestrated attempts don't always
require a conspiracy. People get the drift from other
elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about
how they're going to win the election. When you have
the exit-polling information discrepancies that
occurred in 2004, where the odds of all the swing
states coming in so much stronger for Bush than the
exit polls indicated - they say that that is,
statistically, almost an improbability.
Conyers believes Democrats in the House and Senate
will challenge Ohio's electors on January 6.
I think the Senate is going to go along with an
inquiry this time. I don't think they would embarrass
themselves to let this happen two times in a row.
In the next Congress, Conyers also plans to work for
far-reaching changes in the electoral system.
Everyone is beginning to reexamine the appropriateness
of the Electoral College. We realize that provisional
balloting needs to be streamlined and simplified. We
know that there should be paper trails in computers.
We're beginning to wonder if we haven't privatized the
electoral system so that the computer tabulators can
do more and know more than the electoral commissions
of the counties themselves.
While Conyers is committed to fixing America's broken
electoral system, the man who is getting paid to fix
the system - DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S.
Election Assistance Commission - couldn't care less.
When Scripps-Howard News Service searched the country
for the 10 worst election problems, Soaries refused to
criticize the responsible county officials, and
instead made excuses for them!
Soaries said it's important for election reform
advocates to understand the severe limitations many
local governments face.
"They have limited resources, varying standards. So
why do people get surprised when we get results like
these?" Soaries said while holding pages of data from
the Scripps Howard study.
"We don't want to attack people who don't have the
resources or who've not had the training necessary. We
have to tell the truth, but we don't want to beat up
on these people."
Why the heck not? "These people" are paid by the
taxpayers to conduct honest and accurate elections. If
they screw up, they should get "beat up on" - or
fired!
But more importantly, Soaries needs to identify the
structural problems that lead to major errors - or
expose the whole system to fraud. That's exactly what
Conyers is doing - and Soaries should be at Conyers'
hearings promising to fix all the problems Conyers
finds. If Soaries prefers a coverup to an
investigation, then Congress should tell him to resign
(with Rumsfeld, of course).
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1215-16.htm
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This Article
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 15, 2004
4:44 PM
CONTACT: Sierra Club
Brian O'Malley 202-675-6279
Scientists: 2004 The Fourth Hottest Year On Record
Sierra Club: Bush Fiddles
Statement by Dan Becker, Director, Global Warming,
Sierra Club
WASHINGTON -- December 15 -- "Today, the Geneva-based
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that
2004 is on track to be the fourth-hottest year since
record-keeping began in 1861. The WMO added that
global warming trends will lead to increased extreme
weather events.
"While the Bush administration continues to deny the
seriousness of global warming, temperatures continue
to rise and 2004 joins the 10 warmest years on record
- all occuring since 1990. Today's WMO announcement is
further evidence reinforcing the scientific conclusion
that global warming will lead to increased habitat
loss, sea level rise, and shifting weather patterns.
Sir David King, the British government's top
scientist, called global warming 'more serious even
than the threat of terrorism.' In contrast to the
actions of our leading trading partners and the
warnings of the world's leading scientists, the Bush
administration's approach to global warming ranges
from ostrich-like to flat earth.
"Meanwhile, states are taking the initiative in
attacking global warming. California's recently passed
Pavley Law will require automobile makers to reduce
global warming emissions from new cars and light
trucks beginning in 2009. The Pavley Law is a big step
in the right direction because it delivers clean car
choices for consumers, and encourages cost-effective,
currently available technology to reduce global
warming emissions. Seven Northeastern states plan to
implement California law when it is finalized, and
Canada is considering adopting the measures.
"There is more good news. We have the solutions today
to curb global warming emissions. By using
cost-effective technology, we can slash greenhouse gas
emissions from cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs. Using
this technology can also wean ourselves from our
dangerous oil dependence. We can use energy efficient
technology to cut the energy use of lighting, heating,
cooling and industrial processes. Finally, we can
replace dirty, coal fired power plants with clean,
renewable energy sources like wind, solar power and
cleaner burning natural gas.
"Its time for the Bush administration to take its head
out of the sand and put currently available,
cost-effective solutions to work against the problem
of global warming."
###
F.B.I. E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order
Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques
American Civil Liberties Union
Monday 20 December 2004
Newly obtained F.B.I. records call Defense
Department's methods "torture," express concerns over
"cover-up" that may leave F.B.I. "holding the bag" for
abuses.
NEW YORK - A document released for the first time
today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests
that President Bush issued an Executive Order
authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods
against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU
today are a slew of other records including a December
2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the
Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004
"Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises
concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.
"These documents raise grave questions about where
the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately
rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D.
Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide
from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few
low-ranking soldiers."
The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other
public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against
the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of
Information Act request.
The two-page e-mail that references an Executive
Order states that the President directly authorized
interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation,
stress positions, the use of military dogs, and
"sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc."
The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny
the existence of such an order and immediately to
release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which
was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene
Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI
officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its
agents from employing the techniques that the
President is said to have authorized.
Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an
incident in which Defense Department interrogators at
Guantanamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using
"torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail
concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his
story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will
not be held accountable because these torture
techniques were done [sic] the 'FBI' interrogators.
The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the
public."
The document also says that no "intelligence of a
threat neutralization nature" was garnered by the
"FBI" interrogation, and that the FBI's Criminal
Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the
Defense Department's actions have destroyed any chance
of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail's author
writes that he or she is documenting the incident "in
order to protect the FBI."
"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted
are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said
ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding
that these methods appear to have been adopted as a
matter of policy by the highest levels of government."
The June 2004 "Urgent Report" addressed to the FBI
Director is heavily redacted. The legible portions of
the document appear to describe an account given to
the FBI's Sacramento Field Office by an FBI agent who
had "observed numerous physical abuse incidents of
Iraqi civilian detainees," including "strangulation,
beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the
detainees ear openings." The document states that
"[redacted] was providing this account to the FBI
based on his knowledge that [redacted] were engaged in
a cover-up of these abuses."
The release of these documents follows a federal
court order that directed government agencies to
comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of
Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for
Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights,
Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The
New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the
case.
Other documents released by the ACLU today include:
An FBI email regarding DOD personnel impersonating FBI
officials during interrogations. The e-mail refers to
a "ruse" and notes that "all of those [techniques]
used in these scenarios" were approved by the Deputy
Secretary of Defense. (Jan. 21, 2004)
Another FBI agent's account of interrogations at
Guantanamo in which detainees were shackled hand and
foot in a fetal position on the floor. The agent
states that the detainees were kept in that position
for 18 to 24 hours at a time and most had "urinated or
defacated [sic]" on themselves. On one occasion, the
agent reports having seen a detainee left in an
unventilated, non-air conditioned room at a
temperature "probably well over a hundred degrees."
The agent notes: "The detainee was almost unconscious
on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had
apparently been literally pulling his own hair out
throughout the night." (Aug. 2, 2004)
An e-mail stating that an Army lawyer "worked hard to
cwrite [sic] a legal justification for the type of
interrogations they (the Army) want to conduct" at
Guantanamo Bay. (Dec. 9, 2002)
An e-mail noting the initiation of an FBI
investigation into the alleged rape of a juvenile male
detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (July 28, 2004)
An FBI agent's account of an interrogation at
Guantanamo - an interrogation apparently conducted by
Defense Department personnel - in which a detainee was
wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud
music and strobe lights. (July 30, 2004)
The ACLU and its allies are scheduled to go to court
again this afternoon, where they will seek an order
compelling the CIA to turn over records related to an
internal investigation into detainee abuse. Although
the ACLU has received more than 9,000 documents from
other agencies, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny
even the existence of many of the records that the
ACLU and other plaintiffs have requested. The CIA is
reported to have been involved in abusing detainees in
Iraq and at secret CIA detention facilities around the
globe.
The lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg
and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm
Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C.
Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh
and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Art Eisenberg and
Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and
Jeff Fogel of CCR.
The documents referenced above can be found at:
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/fbi.html
More on the lawsuit can be found at:
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/
-------
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/rewarding_incompetence.php
Rewarding Incompetence
Cindy Sheehan
December 21, 2004
TomPaine.com seldom runs open letters. This week,
however, we're making an exception. In only a few
days, Christians around the country and the world will
be celebrating the birth of Jesus—also called the
Prince of Peace. The backdrop to Christmas this year,
of course, is the war in Iraq that a majority of
Americans now believe was a mistake. Sheehan's
heartfelt rebuke to Time offers a perspective we hope
the nation will hear more of in 2005 as we contemplate
the consequences of our leaders' recklessness.
Cindy Sheehan lives in California.
Dear Time Editors:
My son, Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on
04/04/04. This has been an extraordinary couple of
weeks of "slaps in the faces" to us families of fallen
heroes.
First, the Secretary of Defense—Donald Rumsfeld—admits
to the world something that we as military families
already know: The United States was not prepared for
nor had any plan for the assault on Iraq. Our children
were sent to fight an ill-conceived and badly
prosecuted war. Our troops were sent with the wrong
type of training, bad equipment, inferior protection
and thin supply lines. Our children have been killed
and we have made the ultimate sacrifice for this
fiasco of a war, then we find out this week that
Rumsfeld doesn't even have the courtesy or compassion
to sign the "death letters"—as they are so callously
called. Besides the upcoming holidays and the fact we
miss our children desperately, what else can go wrong
this holiday season?
Well let's see. Oh yes. George W. Bush awards the
Presidential Medal of Freedom to three more architects
of the quagmire that is Iraq. Thousands of people are
dead and Bremer, Tenet and Franks are given our
country's highest civilian award. What's next?
To top everything off—after it has been proven that
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there were no
ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over 1,300 brave
young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in
ruins— what does Time Magazine do? Names George W.
Bush as its "Man of the Year." The person who betrayed
this country into a needless war and whom I hold
ultimately responsible for my son's death and who was
questionably elected, again, to a second term, is
honored this way by your magazine.
I hope we finally find peace in our world and that our
troops who remain in Iraq are brought home
speedily—after all, there was no reason for our troops
to be there in the first place. No reason for my son
and over 1,300 others to have been taken from their
families. No reason for the infrastructure of Iraq to
be demolished and thousands of Iraqis being killed. No
reason for the notion of a "happy" holiday to be
robbed from my family forever. I hope that our
"leaders" don't invade any other countries which pose
no serious threat to the United States. I hope there
is no draft. I hope that the five people mentioned
here (and many others) will finally be held
responsible for the horrible mistake they got our
country into. I hope that competence is finally
rewarded and incompetence is appropriately punished.
These are my wishes for 2005.
This isn't the first time your magazine has selected a
questionable man for this honor—but it's the first
time it affected my family so personally and so
sorrowfully.
Cindy Sheehan
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/22/pirate.radio/
Pirate radio calls for inauguration protestsWASHINGTON
(CNN) -- An unauthorized radio station in the nation's
capital called for "massive protests" in the week
leading up to the January 20 presidential
inauguration.The station broadcast Wednesday at 1680
AM and identified itself as "Guerrilla Radio,
WSQT."During the identification message, an announcer
said, "WSQT is a project of urban activists in the
D.C. area working on housing issues, homeless issues,
issues of war, issues of occupation both at home and
abroad, and issues of the environment that we all have
to live in."After being tipped by a reporter, an
official with the Federal Communications Commission
said enforcement investigators will try to pinpoint
the transmitter using direction-finding equipment.A
man responding to a request for an interview sent to
an e-mail address that had been mentioned on the radio
told CNN the station uses a homemade transmitter and a
concealed antenna."It's about $40 in parts from Radio
Shack and the Dumpster," he said in a telephone
interview Wednesday afternoon. The caller's voice
sounded similar to the voice heard on the broadcasts
throughout the day.Other programming featured rap
music with urgent, unsettled lyrics that were
generally shouted instead of sung. The station's poor
audio quality made the vocalizations nearly
unintelligible.An unidentified announcer said, "It's
time to say no to Bush and no to a ban on
abortions."The announcer also called on the Supreme
Court justices to "get off your butts" and free people
unfairly imprisoned on drug convictions, and further
stated that "we know you can hear our signal up there,
and all you people in Congress."There is no authorized
radio outlet in the Washington area on the frequency
used by the protesters, federal records show.CNN
monitored the signal on a conventional car radio as
far away as the Maryland suburbs, about 10 miles from
downtown Washington.An FCC monitoring station is
within reception range of the signal, the agency
official said.Day of demonstrations plannedA number of
anti-Bush groups have planned protests around
Inauguration Day.Organized events range from
demonstrators turning their backs on President Bush to
war protests.The anti-war, anti-racism group known as
ANSWER has announced a demonstration along
Pennsylvania Avenue as the president travels from the
U.S. Capitol to the White House.A statement at
www.ANSWERcoalition.org calls for participants to
claim spots by 9 a.m.Another group has urged
demonstrators to come to the official public
ceremonies and then, at a set time, to turn their
backs collectively on the president. The group is
organizing on the Web at www.TurnYourBackOnBush.org.A
third group, www.ReDefeatBush.com, seeks to focus
attention on perceived voting irregularities in the
November election.CNN's Paul Courson contributed to
this report.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/22/pirate.radio
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=4816
Saturday 18th December 2004 (21h04) :
Electors across US break traditional pro forma ritual
to use electoral college to protest election
56 comment(s).
Massachusetts Coalition against Election Fraud
accomplished having some Electoral College Electors
submit a unanimous Motion calling for a complete
investigation of this presidential election. We are
now working on having United States senators join a
group of United States Representatives in not
certifying the electoral College vote on January 6.
More Info/Contact:
http://boston.indymedia.org/...
Press Release
Electors across US break traditional pro forma ritual
to use electoral college to protest election
violations
Across the US electors in at least five states, for
the first time in history, turned the heavily scripted
and ritualized electoral college proceedings into a
forum for political action. Frustrated by the relative
inattention to wide spread real voting violations now
numbering in the tens of thousands, Electors called
for congressional investigation and legislative
action.
Vermont electors, on the record and in front of TV
cameras and a number of statewide media outlets,
expressed their concerns for our democracy with
"57,000 complaints already received by the
Congressional Judiciary Committee, we call on Congress
and especially our Vermont Congressional delegation to
investigate." They enumerated credible violations
affecting hundreds of thousands of voters across the
US, Elector Jeffrey Taylor reports.
Opening the traditional statement of thanks for being
introduced at the beginning of the Massachusetts
Electoral College 2004 session, Elector Cathleen
Ashton of Wayland, took the opportunity to demand
"Every vote be counted and every vote count."
As described in local news reports, for the first time
in history, Electors in Maine also went on the record
using the voting process to "call for national voting
reforms." Their statement pointed to the kind of
electoral reforms Maine has that lead to more genuine
elections, such as same day registration, allowing
ex-felons to vote, and clean election reforms "but our
four electoral votes are held meaningless if our
sister states cannot hold elections that are fair,
accurate and verifiable," Elector Lu Bauer said after
the brief ceremony at the State House.
Most extraordinarily, one elector in California cast
his ballot provisional upon "all votes being counted "
provisional, absentee, under- and overvotes,
computerized without paper ballots, even getting valid
votes from those turned away illegally, intimidated,
discouraged by incredibly long waits, etc.? This
incredible act as a creative attempt to get this
message read on the floor of Congress when they open
the ballots on January 6 to consider whether to
certify the vote.
"Never has such a vote been cast by an elector and
without a parliamentarian to rule it in or out at the
electoral college level, we await whether Congress
will acknowledge this type of provisional vote and
address the issues this elector sought to raise or
whether they too will ignore provisional votes," said
Grace Ross, an organizer of the national effort to
support electors to take action and a member of Truth
in Elections.
Even in North Carolina where lack of "swing state"
status left local voting violations relatively
invisible, Democratic Electors and local activists
spoke out about local problems while Republican
Electors voted inside. Elector Mary Roe spoke of
problems she herself witness as an election observer
in her own county as well as saying that ?everyone
deserves to have their votes counted? while deploring
the 4,500 votes NC election officials acknowledged
disappeared in a computerized voting machine crash.
Massachusetts Electors who introduced the motion said
they will use this to lobby Congressional members to
take action now such as objecting to the vote. The
motion passed by acclimation called on Congress to:
"Act to commit Congress to investigate all voting
complaints that might have any validity that they
receive; Act to commit Congress to remedy any voting
rights violations or electoral fraud verified by its
own agents or through the courts; File in Congress and
commit their resources to passage of systemic
remedies."
In speaking at their Mass. press conference
afterwards, one Elector, Tom Barbera spoke of
personally having his life threatened during
get-out-the-vote efforts. Another spoke of being
targeted for intimidation such as being immediately
accosted as an African American entering a Florida
polling place by whites telling her "your kind is not
wanted here", "we don’t want your kind voting here",
"leave"; such threatening behavior meant as
get-out-the-vote volunteers they frequently had to
follow intimidated voters of color out of polling
places and convince them to reenter and agree to
accompany them through the voting process..
Tom Barbera, in presenting the Massachusetts’
Electoral College motion, acknowledging that many
whose voting rights violations were most widely
violated were African American, referenced the Civil
Rights struggle in saying "we believe that as
electors, we have a unique opportunity and obligation
to ensure that justice does not again become so
delayed as to be denied (as happened in 2000)" (END)
---
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswir...
http://votefraudinfo.blogspot.com/
by : Joseph Lopisi
Saturday 18th December 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000740612
Gallup: Online News Hasn't Beaten Old Media -- Yet
By Greg Mitchell
Published: December 21, 2004 12:55 PM ET
NEW YORK Americans are more likely to get their news
from local TV and newspapers than national sources,
according to a Gallup Poll released today. But of all
sources, only news on the Internet is gaining in
popularity.
The poll found that 51% say they get news from local
TV every day, with 44% saying they get it from local
newspapers. Lagging are cable news channels, at 39%,
and network newscasts, at 36%.
An additional 14% say they get news from newspapers
several times a week, bringing that total to 58%.
But every source has fallen somewhat since 2002, with
only news on the Internet gaining, from 15% going
there every day two years ago to 20% doing so today.
Some sources dropped heavily: National newspapers are
off 4%, from 11% to 7%; NPR is off 5%; local TV news
is down 6%; network news down 7%; and PBS news plunged
8%. In that company, local newspapers are doing fairly
well, only dropping 3%. Cable news dropped 2%.
The percentage of those consulting a newspaper daily
was at 54% in 1999, so the falloff has slowed lately.
Contrary to many assessments, young people do not
consult Internet news more often than other sources,
Gallup found. For those 18 to 29, only 21% said they
looked at Web news daily, not much different than the
19% of those 50 to 64 who do so. In that younger age
group, local TV news was most popular, at 33% daily
usage, with local newspapers just off the pace, at
32%. Both far outdistanced the Net, even among youth.
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com) is
E&P's editor.
http://www.msmagazine.com/winter2004/womenoftheyear.asp
Ms. Women of the Year
Heroes for Extraordinary Times
by Elaine Lafferty
Welcome to our annual celebration of extraordinary
women.
As we recognize these heroes, we find ourselves
marveling at their courage and their commitment to
excellence, to do and be the best for themselves and
their communities and families.
This year, another common thread revealed itself:
These women displayed uncommon determination to
accomplish specific goals that had global
consequences.
So what is heroism anyway? In his 1991 book Rescues:
The Lives of Heroes, the superb writer Michael Lesy
noted that many people committed courageous acts when
their own lives were at a low point or even nearly
lost altogether. But nearly all of Lesy’s profiled
heroes were men. Women’s bravery is different. The
late psychotherapist Dr. Miriam Polster, in her book
Eve’s Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Women,
showed how cultural perspectives exclude unique kinds
of heroism that women have commonly exercised.
So we turn first to our Jersey Girls, the four widows
whose determination to seek the truth led to the
creation of the 9/11 Commission.
“Who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation
as the representatives of the nation themselves?”
asked Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers in
1788. What a different world we occupy today; yet it
was these four modern day women, acting as both
inquisitors and representatives of the nation, who
worked and lobbied and organized to hold our
government accountable. We salute them.
Samantha Power, a journalist and scholar, wrote a
600-page book called A Problem from Hell: America and
the Age of Genocide that was so compelling it couldn’t
possibly be dismissed, as its publishers expected it
might be. The book took off, and Power has used her
mighty voice to bring a moral imperative to foreign
policy.
Betty Dukes was the Wal-Mart cashier who just couldn’t
take it anymore. Her courage in taking on the retail
Goliath had changed millions of lives already.
Saudatu Mahdi, the Nigerian
schoolteacher-turned-feminist activist, literally
helped save a woman’s life when she organized
opposition to a death sentence for a woman who bore a
baby out of wedlock.
Far across the world from Nigeria, actor Kathy Najimy
helps save lives by making sure that the rich and
famous do their part for progressive causes.
Rep. Maxine Waters does more than legislate; she
practically commandeered a plane to save the
president.
And Lisa Fernandez collected Olympic gold for keeping
her eye on the ball.
That’s probably a good metaphor as we salute our Women
of the Year, consider the challenges of 2005 and, as
always, invite readers to share in the celebration.
Never give up and never lose sight of what’s
important.
Ms. Women of the Year
read the introduction >>
Jersey Girls Samantha Power Betty Dukes
Saudatu Mahdi
Kathy Najimy Maxine Waters Lisa Fernandez
photo / Heather Weston
Jersey Girls
by Jessica Seigel
In TV murder mysteries, the detective always begins
the investigation by piecing together a timeline of
the crime. And that’s how four 9/11 widows from New
Jersey began their journey from grieving housewives to
unstoppable Nancy Drews.
They sleuthed, lobbied, protested and ultimately
shamed a stonewalling Bush administration into
creating the independent commission that exposed the
incompetence and cover-up surrounding the September
11, 2001 , terror attacks on the World Trade Center
and Pentagon.
Now called the “Jersey Girls” (thanks to a Bruce
Springsteen cover song), they helped force a reckoning
of what really happened that clear September day when
their husbands went to work in the Twin Towers and
never came home.
Nearly 3,000 people died that day, but government
officials insisted that nothing could have prevented
terrorists who just “got lucky” hijacking airplanes.
Left with seven children among them, the four moms
from the Garden State weren’t convinced, and vowed to
find out the truth.
Joining forces through survivor networks, there was
Mindy Kleinberg, a 42-year-old former accountant, who
organized and inspired with her stubborn streak; Lorie
Van Auken, 49, a part-time graphic designer who
researched and strategized; Kristen Breitweiser, 33,
who polished onetime lawyer’s skills to become “The
Hammer”; and Patty Casazza, 43, who gave them heart —
the “pain and suffering” ticket, according to their
easy, in-the-trenches humor.
Sleepless nights spurred them on, as Van Auken and the
others logged onto the Internet hunting for clues from
news and government sources to contradict the official
story.
“From watching Perry Mason we knew they always ask,
‘Where were you at the time of the crime?’” says Van
Auken. “Then they try to reconcile the answers.”
Indeed. As the Jersey Girls pieced together a picture
of widespread bungling, Congress stalled legislation
to probe the attack.
“We said, OK, we have to rally,” says Van Auken. “How
do you throw a rally?”
They figured it out, appearing with 300 relatives of
9/11 victims near the U.S. Capitol’s steps, heading
out before dawn to return in time to say goodnight to
the children. It was just one of countless trips they
would make to Washington, D.C.
With the White House blocking demands for an
independent investigation, the Jersey Girls staged
lobbying visits from the office of their U.S.
congressman, Chris Smith. They queried senior FBI
agents. They strategized with Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle and Sen. John McCain, snooping around the
Capitol to find and waylay them.
They tag-teamed in pairs to net politicians who were
trying to avoid them, catching Republican congressman
Porter Goss hiding behind his office door. A turning
point came when Breitweiser testified before the joint
congressional intelligence committee, her
prosecutorial brilliance transforming the moral
suasion of the widow into a mighty cudgel.
Opening with a story about her 3-year-old daughter
placing flowers on her husband Ronald’s grave, she
held up her right hand to show that she wore his
charred wedding ring — returned to her with his only
remains, an arm. Then she shredded the government’s
lucky-terrorist theory by laying out facts and
questions that would become a road map for future
investigation.
Two days later, the White House dropped its public
opposition to a probe (even while continuing to stall
efforts behind the scenes).
When the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon
the United States — the 9/11 Commission — finally held
its first hearings in the spring of 2003, the four
moms became watchdogs urging tougher questioning, then
guardians agitating against White House foot-dragging
and sabotage tactics.
“The country owes a deep debt of gratitude to the
Jersey Girls and other courageous [9/11] families,”
says Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., a leader of
intelligence-reform efforts. “They turned their
personal grief into a powerful force for change. They
are a mighty moral force.”
History will remember that the bestselling 9/11
Commission Report, published this summer, found no
link between al-Qaeda terrorists and Iraq. Yet the
Republican presidential campaign still beat the drums
for the American war in Iraq.
Outraged, the Jersey Girls abandoned their nonpartisan
stance and endorsed Democratic challenger John Kerry,
although two of them had voted for Bush in 2000.
Greeted as heroines on the Democratic campaign trail,
they have been asked to autograph copies of the 9/11
Report.
What’s the lesson in it all? Democracy, the Jersey
Girls say, is hard work.
photo / Crissy Pascual The San Diego Union Tribune
Samantha Power
by Catherine Orenstein
In April, Samantha Power testified before Congress on
the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. Eight
hundred thousand souls had perished in that tragedy,
and the 34-year-old activist, Harvard lecturer and
author of A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of
Genocide (Perennial, 2003) had in the meantime become
one of the world’s most prominent voices for human
rights.
But instead of focusing on Rwanda that April day,
Power rebuked American policymakers for failing to act
elsewhere.
“I think the great fear that all of us have is that 10
years from now we will be sitting on a similar panel,”
she said — “discussing Sudan’s genocide, looking
back.”
Power has made Sudan’s unfolding crisis her crusade.
She recently returned from Darfur, where local Arab
militiamen backed by the Sudanese government have
killed an estimated 50,000 African tribespeople.
A million and a half more have been displaced by the
marauding Janjaweed, or “evil horsemen,” and in the ad
hoc refugee camps that have been established in the
swamps, women have become principle targets of the
latest wave of ethnic cleansing.
“If there is a most pressing issue in Darfur right
now, it’s probably not murder, but rape,” Power says.
Women, who make up three-quarters of the camp
population, must leave to gather firewood —
humanitarian aid is inedible if unheated — and then
they’re targets for Janjaweed rapists who patrol the
perimeter of the camps on camelback. Many women are
also being branded — an act that makes it even harder
for them to return home. For the Irish-born Power,
this exemplifies what’s wrong with the international
response.
“We give people just enough to live, but we don’t
interfere with those who ruin the way they live. We
give them food, but we don’t ask the question, ‘What
happens next?’ We can reliably predict that women in
[such] situations … will be systematically raped.”
Power pauses, and concludes: “In a sense, you could
say we set them up.”
In person, Power is as intense as she is on the page.
Articulate, low-voiced and emphatic, she delivers her
political opinions with a nonchalant confidence and
enormous conviction. At the same time, her uncombed
red hair and deeply freckled complexion give her an
unassuming look. She looks younger and sounds older
than you’d expect. She certainly doesn’t stand out as
the kind of person you’d expect to find crisscrossing
the globe denouncing atrocities — a “genocide chick,”
as she jokingly refers to herself.
Her introduction to tragedy writ large came in Bosnia,
where she arrived as a young reporter in 1993, shortly
after graduating from Yale University. She was shocked
to find concentration camps on a continent that was
still repeating the refrain “never again.”
When Bosnian Serbs massacred 7,000 Muslim boys and men
in Srebrenica, Power became obsessed with the
question, “How can we reconcile the gap between the
promise of ‘never again’ and our failure to do
anything to stop the tragedy?”
That question led her on a five-year odyssey across
the United States, seeking answers from policy-makers
and from declassified documents she obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act. The result was her 600-
page book about the history of America’s failure after
World War II to stop genocide — in Cambodia, Iraq,
Bosnia and Rwanda.
Her original publisher promptly rejected it — “they
said it was too long and they didn’t think the
American public could handle it,” Power says.
They were wrong, and another publisher celebrated her
Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
Power’s book has changed how we think about genocide,
and even the word itself, first coined by Raphael
Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost his family in the
Holocaust. Like Lemkin, Power has made it more
difficult to look the other way. But that’s not
enough.
Recently anointed one of Time magazine’s 100 most
influential people, Power quipped, “The real test of
my influence is, What are we going to do about Darfur?
“We are all capable of looking away,” says Power, but
“there is always an unforgivable space. It’s important
to find that space, to identify what is gray and what
is not, and to find those people who saw it and who
acted, who showed what could be done. They place
everyone else in relief: the people who stood up.”
photo / Caren Alpert
Betty Dukes
by Ellen Hawkes
The lead plaintiff in the class-action
gender-discrimination suit against Wal-Mart has a
favorite motto: “Never allow fear to get under your
feet,” declares Betty Dukes. “That’s what I tell my
coworkers,” she says, “because we women need to have
the courage to speak out against the unfairness we
have endured.”
Sitting in the Berkeley, Calif., offices of The Impact
Fund, the public-interest legal foundation that is
coordinating the federal case against Wal-Mart, Dukes
recalls how she came to expose the inequities of the
world’s largest retail company (she is, by the way,
still employed as a “greeter” at $12 an hour).
Born in 1950 in Tallulah , La. , she was the seventh
of 12 children; in 1960, her mother, by then on her
own, moved the family to Pittsburg , a town east of
San Francisco . “My mother is 80 now, but she was
then, and still is, strong,” Dukes adds. “She had to
be to raise us by herself, so I probably got some of
my strength from her.”
As an adult, Dukes became active in her community and
in her church, often speaking out at public meetings
and writing letters to her local newspaper.
“I am not shy,” she says with a laugh, “and I believe
in helping others. My spirituality says you have to
address wrong where you see wrong.”
Nevertheless, in her various jobs over the next two
decades, she wasn’t as outspoken. After three years of
high school (she later received her GED and took
courses at a local community college), she entered the
work force, and although she sometimes suffered from
what she felt was unfair treatment, she was hesitant
to complain.
“I was from a poor family, my education was limited,
and I knew I had to support myself,” she says. “I felt
that I should just be grateful for the job I had and
not rock the boat.”
Dukes was hired as a cashier by Wal- Mart in 1994, and
she hoped that her past experience in retail would
help her advance. Yet her requests for further
training and promotion went unanswered, and her
complaints about her salary and rank resulted in what
she considered retaliation.
“It wasn’t just me, though,” Dukes confirms. “We women
knew that we were usually paid less than men, and we
often laughed about how ‘shocked’ we were that some
guy got a promotion that 10 or 12 of us said we were
interested in.”
On August 14, 1999, Dukes was demoted from
customer-service manager to cashier.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she
said. “I felt that they had singled me out because I’m
African American, and they were retaliating for my
complaints about my supervisor. It was like a
lynching, but I survived, and I became determined to
see justice done.”
Advised by a lawyer to file complaints with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, Dukes did so, first
in 2000, alleging racial discrimination, then in 2001,
alleging gender discrimination. She asserted that what
she had undergone was “part of a larger and continuing
pattern of sex discrimination at Wal-Mart.”
At the same time, The Impact Fund, along with other
law firms, began investigating the complaints of
discrimination by Wal-Mart women across the United
States. Hearing Dukes’ story, Impact Fund attorneys
decided that her individual determination was
representative of the women’s collective resolve to
hold the company accountable, and they named her the
lead plaintiff.
In June 2001, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the
largest class-action discrimination suit in history,
was filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
(Dukes’ racial-discrimination case will be tried
separately.)
In June 2004, federal Judge Martin Jenkins certified
the case as a class-action suit; Wal-Mart is now
appealing, and it may be another six months before the
9th Circuit Court of Appeals issues its decision. (For
further information, see Ms. magazine, Fall 2003, and
the website www.walmartclass.com.)
“The wheels of justice turn slowly, but there will be
a day of reckoning,” says Dukes with her engaging
smile. “I am very grateful for this award, especially
since it also honors all the women who were brave
enough to come forward. I know in my soul that our
solidarity will bring us victory.”
photo / Jacob Silberberg Getty Images
Saudatu Mahdi
by Stephanie Nolen
Saudatu Mahdi got to celebrate for about two minutes.
On March 25, 2002, her legal team won acquittal for an
impoverished Nigerian woman who was sentenced to death
by stoning because she had borne a baby out of
wedlock.
Outside the Sharia Court of Appeal in Sokoto, Mahdi
and her colleagues gathered in jubilant
congratulations around the young mother, Safiya
Hussaini.
And then, Mahdi’s cell phone rang: It was her office
in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, telling her that
another young woman with a baby had just been
sentenced to be stoned to death. So Mahdi, a onetime
school administrator-turned-feminist activist, took an
11-hour trek across Nigeria, to Bakori.
Early the next morning, she launched the defense of
Amina Lawal. Lawal’s case became an international
cause célèbre — she was championed by everyone from
Amnesty International to Oprah Winfrey. When Lawal,
who was divorced, had a baby girl in early 2002, the
police used the child as evidence of “adultery.”
In contrast, four eyewitnesses would have been needed
to charge the baby’s father with the same crime. A
sharia court, of the kind that dispenses justice in 12
states in northern Nigeria, found Lawal guilty and
ordered the stoning (but thoughtfully postponed the
sentence until she had weaned her daughter from
breastfeeding).
After a long series of appeals, in September 2003 a
defense team put together by Mahdi’s organization, the
Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative
(WRAPA), won an acquittal. The judge ruled that
Lawal’s confession was taken improperly and that she
didn’t have a lawyer at her first trial.
Pushing for due process in these cases is difficult
but vital work for Mahdi, a devout Muslim who argues
passionately that sharia — Islamic law — treats women
with equity when it is fairly implemented. But shoddy
legal practice and systemic discrimination mean women,
especially poor women, are all too often victims in
the sharia system.
Mahdi is determined to see that changed.
“I did a lot of Islamic studies to determine, ‘What is
it really that Allah says for me, and how can I
negotiate my way in this culture that puts down women
and inhibits them?,’” she says.
During the defense of Hussaini, WRAPA and other
women’s groups were subject to considerable public
criticism in Nigeria and accused of advancing a
godless Western agenda.
“Even from within my family, the comments were not
necessarily all supportive,” Mahdi recalls. “But by
the time the case of Amina came, the criticism was
tempered with, ‘What are these women saying? Is sharia
being done right?’”
Mahdi believes she owes much of her strength to her
father, who defied cultural norms by insisting that
she and her two sisters be educated.
“And my mother, though not educated, was an activist
in her own way: She always stood up for herself and
for others,” she says.
Now 47, Mahdi has six children of her own, ages 10 to
24. Her husband, a doctor, heads Nigeria’s primary
health-care system. Trained as a teacher, she spent
most of her career in senior administrative posts at
secondary schools, but in 1998 geo-politics and a
sexist policy edged her out of her job.
She joined the board of WRAPA, and the next year was
asked to head the organization, which has 12 staffers
plus a team of volunteers across the country, keeping
watch for women needing help in courts and prisons.
WRAPA is now supporting appeals for two more women
sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, Daso
Adamu, 26, and Hajara Ibrahim, 29. Their sexual
partners were both acquitted for lack of evidence.
Mahdi worries that in impoverished Nigeria, it is the
country’s poor — and divorced or widowed women are the
poorest of all — who are victims of the law. And none
of this is good for her beloved faith.
“Many people who sit at a distance and criticize
Islamic law do not know what it provides,” she says.
“But we are getting little help from practitioners of
Islamic law to show that Islam is a religion that
provides for the rights of women.”
photo / Michael Lamont
Kathy Najimy
by Ellen Snortland
You already know that Kathy Najimy is funny. You
guffawed through her classic, long-running “The Kathy
& Mo Show” (with performing sidekick Mo Gaffney). You
giggled every time giddy, scene-stealing Sister Mary
Patrick (Najimy’s character) appeared in Sister Act
and Sister Act 2.
Indeed, any time the actor pops up in one of her many
stage, film or TV guises, you recognize that sharp,
deadpan wit, the eyes filled with mischief. Let’s face
it: Kathy Najimy is fun.
So you know she’s a comedian in front of the lights,
but did you know that behind the scenes, in real life,
Najimy is an action hero? A social action hero.
Women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, Arab
American rights, AIDS, eating disorders — Najimy’s
always on the front lines of progressive causes.
She is not a celebrity who just shows up for events …
Najimy may be well-known face, but she is also a
political workhorse. She is at the planning meetings,
notebook in hand, a critical part of making things
happen. And her participation has the efficiency of a
surgeon. Follow up, everybody! Don’t drop the ball.
Get it on the schedule.
Najimy’s emails alone have guaranteed the success of
more progressive causes than anyone can count. And she
makes sure that her friends are part of it all. She’s
a celebrity wrangler par excellence, making sure her
famous pals show up at rallies and stump for social
justice as well.
“Kathy is a dynamic force who has the ability to
persuade you into thinking that she is absolutely
right about everything she says,” says her good friend
Ellen DeGeneres. “Luckily for us, she usually is.”
“Some activists can make people feel like they are not
doing it right, or that they must commit 100 percent,”
says the 47-year-old Najimy. “I’m grateful for
whatever action someone can take. Everything counts.”
And when it came time to March for Women’s Lives in
Washington, D.C., in April, who was exhorting the
crowd from the stage? Well, it wasn’t just Najimy, but
also her 7-year-old, dark-haired daughter Samia,
wearing a pink “Radical Feminist” T-shirt, who grabbed
the mike to shout, “We are feminists and we’re making
a change!”
Becoming a mom has only heightened Najimy’s commitment
to choice — or as she puts it, being pro-life (“We
couldn’t be more pro-life—we’re for the lives of girls
and women”). She’s also passionate about transforming
a society that pressures children, even, to obsess
about their bodies.
“Six out of 10 11-year-old girls are on a diet or have
an eating disorder,” she points out. “If we women
weren’t so tied up with our bodies, we’d be running
the world.”
When Najimy — perhaps the most famous Lebanese
American since Danny Thomas — wasn’t organizing or
marching in 2004, she was busy performing “Afterbirth:
Kathy and Mo’s Greatest Hits” for grateful fans in Los
Angeles and New York. She and Gaffney create
characters who belie stereotypes and reveal a common
humanity: Their idealism is woven into every part they
play.
As Najimy’s friend Gloria Steinem — who officiated at
her wedding to singer/actor Dan Finnerty — describes
her, “Kathy creates laughter that comes out of
compassion and leads to understanding. I see the
intelligence and generous heart that informs
everything she does.”
As a “chubby girl” growing up in San Diego, the
youngest of four children of Lebanese immigrants,
Najimy “was an outsider — which actually allowed me to
see more options for myself, because I had to,” she
says.
By high school, she’d discovered both feminism and
theater, and at San Diego State University helped
found a performance troupe that offered improv with a
feminist message. Then she met Gaffney, and together
they conspired to create “feminist comedy,” which led
them off- Broadway and onto the small screen, with two
Kathy and Mo specials for HBO.
In the mid-1990s, the pair began making individual
names for themselves, while remaining friends and
ultimately reviving their old material (plus adding a
couple of new sketches). No matter what roles she
essays, Najimy makes sure they are true to her values.
“Activism is hardwired into her, like having brown
eyes,” says Gaffney. “She was born with this need to
see people — and animals — be treated equitably.”
Let the final words of praise come from yet another
Najimy friend — and Friend: “If you’re going to have
someone fighting a cause for you,” says Jennifer
Aniston, “You better hope it’s Kathy Najimy.”
photo / Steve Goldstein
Maxine Waters
by Lisa Armstrong
On this crisp fall afternoon, Rep. Maxine Waters,
D-Calif., is putting the finishing touches on a press
release criticizing the Bush administration’s lack of
action in stopping the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. It
is tentatively titled “Damn It Mr. Bush, Do
Something.”
Her staff asks if she’s sure she wants to risk
ruffling feathers by leaving it that way. Her answer,
in trademark Waters fashion, is definitive: “Yes.”
Waters, 66, has been battling injustice, in all forms,
for most of her life. Former Mayor of Los Angeles
Richard Riordan once said of her, “She’s a pit bull.”
“I am a little bit confrontational and I’m described
as someone who will speak her mind — that’s true,”
says Waters, one of the highest-ranking African
American women in U.S. politics. “But I try to pick my
battles.”
This year, Waters picked a rescue mission that the
most staid legislators wouldn’t have touched. Her
friend Jean- Bertrand Aristide, the democratically
elected president of Haiti, alleged that he was
forcibly removed from office, kidnapped and taken by
U.S. Marines to the Central African Republic (CAR),
one of the world’s poorest countries, deep in the
heart of Africa and not known for its allegiance to
law and order. He telephoned Waters for help.
She was quickly on the phone to the U.S. State
Department (which denied Aristide’s allegation),
complaining about what she’s termed a “crude, cruel
regime change.”
Within two weeks, Waters assembled a delegation to
board a 12-seat private plane to fly to Africa and
bring Aristide to Jamaica, which had offered asylum.
It was a somewhat harrowing 40-hour, 17,000-mile
flight from Miami, complete with two refueling stops.
When the delegation arrived in Bangui, the CAR
capital, Waters told the CAR foreign minister, “We
would like to meet your president and then we must ask
to leave this evening with President Aristide.”
A seven-and-a-half-hour, albeit polite, standoff
ensued. In the end, Aristide and his wife were
permitted to leave with Waters’ delegation. She
maintains that the Bush administration removed
Aristide in part to maintain a cheap source of labor
for American businesses and to protect the Haitian
elite from paying taxes.
“This is about control, about keeping the Haitian
working class down,” she says. “Aristide had the
audacity to tell poor people that they should have a
hand in shaping their democracy.”
Waters knows poverty: She and her 12 siblings were
raised by a single mother in St. Louis who often had
to rely on welfare. Waters started working in
factories and segregated restaurants when she was 13,
but, despite her disadvantages, prevailed.
“My mother was a very strong woman and she instilled
confidence in us,” she says.
In addition, three particular teachers not only
educated Waters but fostered her development outside
of school.
“When you’re poor and have lots of siblings, no one
sees you as a thinking individual with talents,” she
says. “[Ms. Carter, Ms. Stokes and Ms. Johnson] saw
me; they looked at me and they saw a person.”
She’s represented California’s 35th District since
1990, after beginning her political career in the
state Assembly. Among her many crusades, she has been
a champion of Head Start and child-abuse programs,
successfully fought to divest state pension funds from
those doing business with apartheid South Africa, and
helped expand U.S. debt relief for Africa and other
developing nations.
She’s particularly devoted to easing the plight of
women and children — those most affected by indigence.
Her Democratic Party might not be talking too much
about poverty these days, but she certainly is.
“Poverty is all-consuming — so much potential is
unrealized, dreams are dashed,” she says. “Until we
find a way to help people earn, to overcome obstacles
to getting a job and an education, this country will
never be what it can be.”
Even as her attention has turned to the genocide in
Sudan, she still keeps a watchful eye on Haiti and the
rest of the Caribbean. She’s currently lobbying
Congress for $500 million in supplemental aid to those
nations that were devastated by the four recent
hurricanes. For us, Waters is far more than dedicated;
she is a hero.
photo / Reuters/Ray Stubblebine
Lisa Fernandez
by Michele Kort
If softball superstar Lisa Fernandez had hung up her
glove at age 29 — having played competitively for 21
years and earned two collegiate championships at UCLA
and two Olympic gold medals — no one would have blamed
her for taking a breather. But she and her fans would
have missed her most spectacular performance yet, at
this past summer’s Olympic Games.
Fernandez — a pitcher and third baseperson who’s
considered the world’s best all-around player — threw
fourwinning games, including the gold-medal contest,
and batted .545, an Olympic record.
Other American women’s teams won gold in Athens —
basketball, soccer, the swim freestyle relay and the
beach volleyball duo of Misty May and Kerri Walsh —
and women’s teams from China , Romania , Germany and
Australia also won multiple golds.
But, arguably, no team in any Olympic sport was more
dominant than USA softball. Not only did they win each
of the nine games they played, but they allowed
opponents a total of just one run.
For Fernandez, a dark-haired, latte-skinned woman with
a solid build and a disarming smile, success was a
matter of both team chemistry and individual pride.
She set herself the personal challenge — and Fernandez
is hardwired to shoot for the toughest goals — to
better hit her nemesis, the curveball.
“It was the pitch I knew I was going to see,” she
says. “So I spent hours and hours working on it — and
I was terrible. But I said, ‘Just keep throwing it to
me. Keep throwing it.’ And lo and behold, first ball I
saw at the Games, curveball, and I doubled over the
right fielder’s head. Next game, same pitch, bam, base
hit into right field that scores the game-winning
run.”
The moral was a familiar one for Fernandez: “If you’re
going to go after something, go after it with
everything you have, or else it’s not worth doing.”
It’s a lesson she might have learned from her
grandmother, the first feminist she knew.
“If my uncle went to the park, then my mother had to
go,” she says. “My grandmother didn’t segregate what
was OK for the boy from what was OK for the girl. That
carried on to my mom.”
Lisa Fernandez was literally born to be a ballplayer.
Her mother, Emilia, played slow-pitch softball (the
version of the game with the high-arcing pitch) while
growing up in Puerto Rico. Her father, Tony, played
semipro baseball in his homeland, Cuba. Fernandez
feels a powerful responsibility to her ethnic
heritage.
“I represent more than the U.S. — I represent
Hispanics also,” she says. “My opponents who may be
Puerto Rican, who may be Cuban, who may be from the
Dominican — we’re all a family.”
She also represents the aspirations of women athletes
hoping to make a living from their sport. This April
she’ll launch Fernandez Fastpitch, a tour of 15 cities
featuring both amateur softball teams and the new
Ladies Professional Fastpitch Association.
Other than the NBA-supported WNBA, it’s been a
Sisyphean task for women’s team players to maintain
support for their professional leagues. For example,
the recent women’s professional soccer league, WUSA,
shut down after just three seasons.
“It’s frustrating for me to look at the opportunities
males have in order to succeed, but if women’s
professional leagues don’t happen overnight, they’re
not going to happen,” says Fernandez.
“We’ve made a far, far improvement from where women’s
sports was 10, 15 years ago, but I think if we were on
TV more, people would realize, ‘God, it’s amazing how
far she can hit that ball. It’s amazing how strong she
is, how quick she is.’ People might stop perceiving
women athletes’ looks first, athletics second.”
Fernandez remains determined to keep changing those
perceptions. She hopes to play Olympic softball again
in Beijing in 2008 — even if she and her husband,
Michael Lujan, a special-education teacher, start a
family in the interim.
And why not? Baseball slugger Barry Bonds is 40;
Fernandez will only be 37.
“Thus far I’ve had no injuries, no problems,” she
says. “If I can feel this way in 2008, maybe even 2012
won’t be out of the question. I’m never going to put a
limit on myself.” After all, she can hit any curveball
thrown to her.
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