Sunday, October 29, 2006

USA elections are rigged, it is certain

Part I: The Elephant in the Polling Booth

By Mark Crispin Miller

The Washington Spectator

Sunday 01 October 2006

To say that this election could go either way is not to say that the
Republicans have any chance of winning it. As a civic entity responsive to
the voters' will, the party's over, there being no American majority that
backs it, or that ever would. Bush has left the GOP in much the same
condition as Iraq, Afghanistan, the global climate, New Orleans, the Bill
of Rights, our military, our economy and our national reputation. Thus the
regime is reviled as hotly by conservatives as by liberals, nor do any
moderates support it.

So slight is Bush's popularity that his own party's candidates for
Congress are afraid to speak his name or to be seen with him (although
their numbers, in the aggregate, are even lower than his). It seems the
only citizens who still have any faith in him are those who think God
wants us to burn witches and drive SUVs. For all their zeal, such
theocratic types are not in the majority, not even close, and thus there's
no chance that the GOP can get the necessary votes.

And so the Democrats are feeling good, and calling for a giant drive
to get the vote out on Election Day. Such an effort is essential - and not
just to the Democrats but to the very survival of this foundering
Republic. However, such a drive will do the Democrats, and all the rest of
us, more harm than good if it fails to note a certain fact about our
current situation: i.e., that the Democrats are going to lose the contest
in November, even though the people will (again) be voting for them. The
Bush Republicans are likely to remain in power despite the fact that only
a minority will vote to have them there. That, at any rate, is what will
happen if we don't start working to pre-empt it now.

Even though this election could go either way, neither way will
benefit the Democrats. Either the Republicans will steal their
"re-election" on Election Day, just as they did two years ago, or they
will slime their way to "victory" through force and fraud and strident
propaganda, as they did after Election Day 2000. Whichever strategy they
use, the only way to stop it is to face it, and then shout so long and
loud about it that the people finally perceive, at last, that their
suspicions are entirely just - and, this time, just say no.

An Inconvenient Truth - That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election" is
not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the shadow of
a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary Committee - or
rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a meticulous inquiry into
the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted the investigation, and
obstructed it.) Its findings were released on January 5, 2005, in the
so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the committee's
ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading
Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly
accurate.

In July of that year the Democratic National Committee came out with
its own study of Ohio, which offers still more evidence of fraud - before
concluding, weirdly, that there was no fraud but rather much
"incompetence" (all of which somehow helped only the GOP). Despite its
stated contradiction of the House report, the DNC analysts disprove not
one of Conyers's findings.

A few months later, the House report was bolstered by a thick volume
of evidence compiled by the investigators who had helped the Democrats
conduct their research in Ohio: Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Steve
Rosenfeld. Their book How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is
Rigging 2008 reconfirms the House report with rich documentation, and
evidences further fraud as well. Although the book went largely
unreviewed, its findings proved unassailable; as did my essay in the
August 2005 issue of Harper's, "None Dare Call It Stolen" (this was the
first time any major medium addressed the issue).

While such works dealt only with Ohio in 2004, others soon appeared,
demonstrating that Team Bush, that year, defrauded the electorate
nationwide. My book Fooled Again documented the ultra-rightist crime wave
that undid countless votes not only in Ohio but in Florida, Pennsylvania,
Oregon, New York, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan,
Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. It also detailed the
interference of Bush/Cheney with the votes of millions of Americans abroad.

Despite a national media blackoutno reviews in any major U.S. dailies
or newsmagazines, no interviews on network TV or radio, or on NPR or
PBSFooled Again eventually found a large readership through the Internet,
C-SPAN, Air America, and broad local radio coverage.

This past June, the case against the Bush regime was expanded by
three major works. Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss's Was the 2004 Election
Stolen? devastates the fiction that the exit polls conducted on Election
Day were wrong. Despite Freeman's scrupulous research, that book too went
unreviewed. Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse dissects the huge fraud(s)
whereby the Bush/Cheney ticket "won" New Mexico despite the strongly
Democratic inclination of the state's Hispanic voters, who turned out in
record numbers to dump Bush. (Somehow, over 17,000 of them cast no vote
for president, according to the e-voting machines deployed in Democratic
precincts.)

More noticeably, Rolling Stone ran Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s,
comprehensive study of Ohio, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"a piece the
media could not ignore because its author was too famous. Thus Kennedy
appeared on some shows that had been closed to all us other analysts,
although his piece relied explicitly on our research; and even he was
treated like a fantasist, or a felon, by the likes of Neil Cavuto, Tucker
Carlson, Wolf Blitzer and Charlie Rose. Aside from those interrogations
(and a decent head-to-head with Stephen Colbert, who let him finish
several sentences), Kennedy too was disrespected by the media, which
either blacked him out or put him down.

In short, the awful truth about 2004 has been denied by right and
left alikeand, strange to say, more loudly on the left. Indeed, whereas
the right has largely chosen to avoid the issue, the only journalists who
have purported to "debunk" the "theory" of Bush and Cheney's stolen
re-election have been liberals and progressive (and, ordinarily, excellent
reporters): Mark Hertsgaard at Mother Jones; Russ Baker at TomPaine.com;
David Corn at The Nation; and, above all, Farhad Manjoo at Salon.

Their "refutations" of the case are largely based on the mere
exculpatory say-so of a few unconscious (or complicit) Democrats. And yet,
although the work of these debunkers has itself been thoroughly debunked
(and Manjoo, therefore, quietly assigned to other topics), it has done
much to propagate the myth that there's "no evidence" that Bush & Co.
subverted our democracy. Such denials have been persuasive not because
they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a lot of
people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to believe
that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept "the liberal media" from
dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever faced.

And yet most of our fellow citizens sense that threat. A Zogby poll
in August found that only 45 percent of the American people felt "very
confident" that Bush was re-elected "fair and square," while the rest
either doubted it or were "not at all confident" about it. The numbers of
the blithe have been decreasing as the people have learned more and more
about BushCo's fascistic antics in 2004 - and, as well, about the fatal
flaws in the e-voting systems that the Republicans have been aggressively
promoting since 2000. (Some Democrats have abetted them.)

The flaws of such systems have been exposed repeatedly by activists
like Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Clint Curtis, Lynn Landes, Earl Katz and
Bruce O'Dell, and have also been solemnly detailed in many academic
studiesfrom, among others, NYU's Brennan Center for Justice; Princeton's
Center for IT Policy; RABA Technologies; SAIC (Science Applications
International Corporation); the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and
a cohort of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins, Rice and Stanford
universities. (See previous issues of the Washington Spectator, here and
here.)

Read together, all those exposés and studies tell of a close and
wholly illegitimate relationship between the corporate vendors of those
voting systems and Bush/Cheney's GOP. Three of the four firms that sell
those systemsDiebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivichave tight links with the
party. The fourth, Sequoia, has also tended to malfunction in
Bush/Cheney's favor.

Now we have strong evidence of a covert partnership between those
interests that "count" some four-fifths of U.S. votes and the party that
controls our government. In a follow-up piece for Rolling Stone, Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., quotes the shocking testimony of a Diebold whistle-blower
who, along with other employees, took part in the surreptitious placement
of a software "patch" in the company's machines in Georgia (whose
electoral system had, just weeks before, been privatized through a secret
contract with the Secretary of State). The order came directly from Bob
Urosevich, president of Diebold's e-voting machine division. "We were told
not to talk to county personnel about it," says Chris Hood, a consultant
to the company. And what about that patch? "We were told that it was
intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood noted.
"The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

All this happened one sticky day in August 2002. On Election Day,
some ten weeks later, the official outcome of the vote baffled everyone:
Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat whom polls showed had been leading his
opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by five points, lost by seven points. In the
race for governor, Democrat Roy Barnes, who had been leading Republican
Sonny Perdue by eleven points, lost by five. Both losses were
inexplicable, and Cleland's was especially poignant. A war veteran and
triple amputee, Cleland was quite popular in Georgia, whereas Chambliss
was unknown - and a chickenhawk to boot, a "bad knee" having kept him out
of Vietnam. Chambliss's attack ads had cast Cleland as a traitor, because
he had voted against establishing the Department of Homeland Security. And
now the people of the Peach State had apparently been swayed by their fear
of terrorism into believing that those ads were right.

That year there were other such anomalies, induced, perhaps, by what
some wags called "Diebold magic," as the company's product figured heavily
in those other states where far-right candidates won upset victories:
Colorado, where Republican Wayne Allard, down by nine points against
Democrat Tom Strickland, won by five points; and New Hampshire, where
Republican John Sununu, down by one point against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen,
won by four points.

As odd as such reversals seemed, and as conspicuous a role as Diebold
evidently played in them, there were no calls for inquiry, as it was
easier to say that "terrorism" - or maybe "family values" - had simply
grabbed the voters' hearts and minds in Georgia, Colorado and New
Hampshire. (Diebold, in fact, had no hand in Republican Norm Coleman's
startling victory over Walter Mondale in Minnesota - the born-again New
Jerseyite having trailed the favorite son by five points, then winning
suddenly by three.) Thus did the Bush Republicans take back the Senate,
thereby canceling out the Democratic edge enabled briefly by Jim
Jeffords's controversial exit from the GOP.

Saving Our Democracy - We must delve into the recent past, not to
quibble over ancient numbers but to find out where we really are today.
For what happened in some states four years ago, and in most states two
years ago, is still happening now, and in more states than ever: a vast,
complex and incremental process of mass disenfranchisement - which is, in
fact, the only way the Bush Republicans could ever get "elected," as their
program is not conservative but radical, irrational, apocalyptic: i.e.,
unacceptable to most Americans, liberals and true conservatives alike.

This is why they've gerrymandered Texas and (less visibly) Virginia -
and also why they've packed the Supreme Court with comrades disinclined to
outlaw gerrymandering (unless it's Democrats who try it). This is why they
are dead-set against repealing state laws disenfranchising ex-felons - and
also why they've used the "war on drugs" to jail as many likely Democrats
as possible. (This would also help explain the post-Katrina diaspora, and
especially the out-of-state internment of over 70,000 Louisianans.) And
this is why the Bush Republicans push e-voting machines in every state,
and program them to flip votes cast by Democrats into votes "cast" for
Republicans, and systematically provide too few machines to Democratic
precincts, and keep on arbitrarily removing Democrats from voter rolls,
and "challenge" would-be voters at the polls, and simply throw out
countless ballots of all kinds, and spread disinformation on Election Day.
These are just some of the devices that were used not only in Ohio to
ensure Bush/Cheney's "re-election," but in every state where they could
pull it off - on both coasts, in the Midwest, and throughout the South.

In the next issue of the Spectator, I'll elaborate on the GOP's two
likeliest moves in November's mid-term elections. For now, we must do all
we can to make everyone aware of what's been going down - and, most
important, what is now at stake. As the press and the Democrats have
failed to call for any actual reform of the election system, Bush and Co.
are now in a superb position to retain their legislative power, regardless
of how people vote (or try to vote).

We need a massive turnout in November - but not because it will put
Democrats in power. We need the biggest turnout ever, as a protest on
behalf of free and fair elections in America. Such a turnout will make it
that much harder for the Bush Republicans to spin their victory as
legitimate. (This is why the GOP in several states, including Maryland and
Colorado, is urging people to vote absentee next month: to make the
opposition appear that much smaller.) But more important, such a turnout
will prepare people for the crucial fight to come - the effort to save our
democracy.

If we get millions out to vote, without informing them they may well
"lose" anyway, the blow will devastate them, just as Kerry's abrupt
concession did in 2004. It took two years to get Americans mobilized
again. If Bush and his allies steal the next election, we won't have years
to start resisting. The resistance must start on Day One, just as in
Ukraine and Mexico; and so the people must be ready for the fight - and so
they need to know enough to wage it, and to win it.

Part II: Our Rigged Elections

Monday 15 October 2006

The GOP Playbook: How to steal the vote.

From the start, George W. Bush has pointedly refused to ask that we
make any national sacrifice to help us win the "war on terror." Soon after
9/11 he urged us not to curb our appetites in any way, although to do so
would have made much sense, and makes sense now. After all, it's oil, in
part, that U.S. troops are fighting for, and oil that indirectly pays for
all the guns and bombs now blowing those troops, and countless others, to
shreds. The patriotic thing would therefore be to lessen our national
dependency on fossil fuels, by driving less (or not at all), and turning
off the air conditioners, by buying fewer disposables, and otherwise
deferring to the greater good. Bush, however, will have none of that,
asserting that the best thing we can do to help win this war is just go
shopping.

Yet in one respect it's not exactly right to say that our president
has asked nothing of us. Since 9/11, Bush has made astonishing demands on
all his fellow citizens, asking us to swallow more baloney than the U.S.
government has ever fed the people of this country. He and his team have
asked us to believe that 9/11 came as a complete surprise, that Saddam
Hussein was part of it, and that Iraq would soon be lobbing atom bombs,
poison gas, and lethal pathogens at Tel Aviv and Disney World. They also
asked us to believe that the Iraqi people would bestrew our troops with
flowers, then that the "mission" had been "accomplished," then that those
friendly natives had been overrun by "foreign terrorists" intent on
wrecking the "democracy" that we were there to build. And now Bush asks us
to believe that things aren't half as bad in Iraq (not to mention
Afghanistan), as they appear, and that his team can win this war.

That most Americans do not believe a word of it, and therefore will
not vote Republican, attests to the diffusive power of truth, which in
this country still resonates despite the efforts of both government and
media to bury it. Bush's big lies have prevailed not just because his
regime has so doggedly promoted them. For too long, those howlers also had
the benefit of a compliant press that simply echoed them.

But the truth about Iraq could not be spun away as more and more
Americans encountered it, traumatically, in their own lives, and as the
word spread ever further through the Internet and other unofficial
channels - an arduous process of enlightenment that the press has only
recently begun to help along. (The Democrats have mostly sat there mute.)
And so the White House's claims about Iraq - and about 9/11, Afghanistan,
Katrina, the economy, the public schools, the global climate and the GOP's
respect for "family values" - strike millions of Americans as utter hooey.

Terrorism and Turnout - Of all the crackpot views pervading BushCo's
faith-based universe, there's one that still pervades the real world, too:
the myth of the two T's. "Terrorism and turnout," as the New York Times
puts it, "were the 'two t's' that have been credited with GOP dominance in
the last three [sic] elections." And as they'd swept BushCo to victory
twice before, so will the two T's shortly benefit the GOP again - or so
Karl Rove allegedly believes.

This year, AP reported recently, "the White House will reprise the
two T's of its successful campaign strategy since 2002: terrorism and
turnout." In other words, the Bush Republicans expect to win again through
(a) fear itself, aroused by the eternal aftershock of 9/11; and (b) by
mobilizing the expansive legions of their Christianist supporters.

That sounds plausible - until you think about it. There's no evidence
that either terrorism or the Christian right decided the 2004 election. A
Pew poll published on November 11 of that year found that the terror
threat had driven only 9 percent of the electorate. There were no sudden
multitudes of "NASCAR dads" and "security moms" supporting Bush in 2004 -
and there was no electoral tsunami of right-wing evangelism either.

For all the big talk by the leaders of the Christian right, Bush was
not re-elected by the faithful, as there were nowhere near enough of them
to pull it off. Nationwide, there were 4 million evangelicals who hadn't
voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000, and Karl Rove wooed them. Even if he got
them all, however, that triumph would not explain the miracle of Bush's
picking up 11 million more votes than he'd allegedly won against Al Gore.
This insufficiency is clearer still when we recall the incumbent's record
disapproval ratings. Hovering in the high mid-40s, Bush's negatives were
worse than Lyndon Johnson's in 1968 and Jimmy Carter's in 1980. On the
other hand, Democrats were extraordinarily united. At registering new
voters, they trounced the GOP by as much as 5 to 1 in big swing states. By
contrast, Bush's party was divided, with many eminent Republicans, both
moderates and hardcore conservatives, either coming out for Kerry or for
neither one.

Bush's evangelical advantage was further diminished by the heavy
national turnout on Election Day: 60.7 percent, the highest in thirty-six
years (and it was no doubt even higher, as there were thousands of reports
of Democrats who couldn't vote because their names had somehow vanished
from the rolls). High turnout tends to favor Democrats. In any case, the
Christianists' peculiar brand of "moral values" drove few voters to the
polls: Pew found that only 3 percent had been incited by the specter of
gay marriage, while only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main
concern.

A Credible Pretext - In short, Bush/Cheney was not swept to
re-election by a national surge of theocratic zeal. And yet Bush's most
fanatical supporters were essential to his "victory," which they enabled
by providing a persuasive-sounding rationale for it. Because there was,
and is, no reasonable explanation for that win, it was efficiently
explained away as having been effected by the non-existent multitude of
True Believers. Providentially, their votes came pouring forth late on
Election Day, especially in Ohio - a propaganda line without a shred of
evidence to back it up. (The late-day turnout in Ohio's rural districts
was, in fact, quite light.) And yet that notion soon became gospel, as the
media, and the Democrats, mechanically echoed the mere say-so of the Bush
team and the Christianists themselves.

For the subversion of democracy, some such convincing rationale is
just as crucial as computers, ballot "spoilage," Jim Crow laws and party
goons - and the regime now needs a sturdy pretext more than ever, as the
Republicans have reached new lows in popular esteem. Thus the two T's are
now all-important; and, to complicate Karl Rove's project even further,
only one of them remains as feasible as both appeared to be in 2004. Since
then Bush's Christian-right support has been eroded by the war and the
economy, BushCo's accommodationist stance on immigration, the party's
failure to stamp out abortion, same-sex marriage and "obscenity," and, not
least, the low farce of Foleygate.

"Terrorism" is now the one and only argument whereby the ravaged GOP
might arguably validate their next amazing win. This explains why Rove has
had the White House stick so closely to the "terrorism" script, even
though the White House has itself conceded that this script is not so
credible: Bush admits that there's no evidence of links between Al Qaeda,
9/11 and Saddam Hussein - and yet he continues yawping at the links
between them, most startlingly in his anniversary speech a few weeks ago
on September 11.

That oration kindled broad astonishment at the psychotic fixity of
its key thesis: i.e., that U.S. troops are in Iraq to halt the spread of
global terror (and not themselves a major stimulus thereto, as Bush's own
intel establishment has bluntly noted). That line has been disdained not
only by the media but also by the GOP's top pundits and Congressional
candidates, more and more of whom, the New York Times reported on
September 3, "are disregarding Mr. Rove's advice."

That Rove won't give it up attests to its essential function as
pre-propaganda: Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think it
will win votes. They don't care whether people vote for them or not.
Rather, they've been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will fly
as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress, even
though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in part, on
the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the political
establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see that this
regime has never even been elected.

Such terror-obsessed pre-propaganda also tragically portends an
imminent "surprise" deployed, before Election Day, to make Bush's empty,
crazy argument seem suddenly believable. Whether it's a second 9/11, or a
huge "defensive" strike against Iran, or a paralyzing combination of the
two, a move like that would serve to make the recent Bush/Cheney line on
"terror" sound prophetic rather than insane.

"Counting" the Vote - However they may seek to validate the electoral
fraud, the Bush bunch are now in a superb position to effect it. First of
all, computerized voting and vote-counting are today far more extensive
than they were two years ago, thanks to the relentless efforts of the GOP,
the e-voting manufacturers and not a few compliant Democrats.

Although some victories have been won for democratic practice through
tireless bipartisan citizen activism, most notably in Colorado, North
Carolina and New Mexico, such grassroots triumphs have been overshadowed
by the juggernaut's immense success at reddening blue America. In 2004, 23
percent of the electorate cast their votes on "direct-recording
electronic" (DRE) machines. Today, according to Election Data Services,
it's over 39 percent. And nearly 41 percent will have their votes counted
by computerized scanners - a method preferable to using DRE machines, as
it allows for paper ballots, but a risky practice nonetheless. Thus over
80 percent of next month's vote will be counted secretly, by private
vendors closely tied to Bush's party.

The GOP has also furthered mass disenfranchisement by passing Jim
Crow laws of startling brazenness (yet that have gone largely unnoticed by
the press). The Ohio legislature has passed a law that quadruples the
price of recounts, makes machine audits near-impossible, hinders
registration of new voters, tightens partisan control of the election
work-force and requires all voters to bring IDs to the polls. Photo IDs,
effectively a poll tax, are now required in Indiana and Florida - where,
moreover, it is now illegal to hand-count paper ballots once they have
been "counted" by machine. Through such laws - and epidemic lawlessness -
the party will control the vote throughout the nation on November 7.

Brazen Behavior - While the party has pre-empted innumerable votes
below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the
voters openly, if they should dare resist the party's will. Take, for
example, last summer's special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat of
the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who is now
doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the pre-election
polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray of the GOP; and
then it came out that the party's poll workers had been ordered to take
the e-voting machinery home with them for several days before the vote.

At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task
to fiddle with the gadgets' memory cards and thereby fix the final count),
San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A week after
the election - and seventeen days before the vote was even certified -
Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in by House
Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was, still more
amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who argued that
the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker of the House
had made the people's choice.

If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat,
irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House
elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have
Congress's membership decided by the Speaker of the House - or by
President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the
press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have been
some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely
disregarded it (while Hastert's role in Foleygate is a huge story).

Eleventh-Hour Plan - Such journalistic silence makes it all the
likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again - although it's
also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it on
Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular
resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen, though,
the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press's eerie silence on
the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.

If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a
noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This is
no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who lately
told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game will be
to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have fixed the
race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud" through phantom
ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all the other tricks
whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime will, in short,
deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around as many races as
they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.

Of course, the Democrats themselves have a rich history of election
fraud, but there's no evidence of much, if any, since Bush came upon the
scene; and yet with very few exceptions, they have doggedly refused to
speak about the growing danger of such fraud, so that the GOP - the very
perpetrators of that fraud - will be the first to make an issue of it. The
press too has ignored the issue, other than to bleat, from time to time,
that such malfeasance has been common "on both sides." Thus this besieged
democracy appears now to have no defenders but ourselves. But we can do
that vital work if we will only face what's happening and spread the word,
and stand united not as party members, or as liberals, moderates and
conservatives, but as Americans.

Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and
Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a
professor of culture and communication at New York University.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906O.shtml

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Friday, October 27, 2006

Shitty John Lennon Film


FILM
IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE WATCHING THIS MOVIE

JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com

Though ostensibly constructed as an ode to resilience and idealism, there.s a deceptive, perhaps unintentional sort of cynicism at work in David Leaf and John Scheinfeld.s documentary The US vs John Lennon, one that sort of creeps up on you as a dizzying number of authorities of every stripe flash on screen to help narrate the film.s story.

It really started to hit me when former New York governor Mario Cuomo was explaining that Vietnam was an .unpopular. war and cemented itself once former US senator and presidential candidate George McGovern described the US public under Nixon as feeling .divided..

My point isn.t to knock these guys for their understatements. Rather, I feel a more general despondence upon the realization that Leaf and Scheinfeld really seem to believe our collective cultural memory to be so pathetically shallow as to need such for-dummies prompting.

To affect seriousness, Leaf and Scheinfeld populate their film with such luminaries as Tariq Ali, Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, who gets to weigh-in for all of nine seconds and says absolutely nothing of substance. I mean, it takes effort to put Noam Chomsky in a movie and have him say nothing of substance. And maybe it says something about the depth of Leaf and Scheinfeld.s concerns that Geraldo Rivera gets far more screen-time.

Of course, the reason for so much excessively broad contextualization may be that the actual thesis of The US vs John Lennon is either too limited a subject to focus on or simply too superficially dealt with, thus the filmmakers pad out their core material with a quickie elementary class in recent US history (and pat baby-boomers on the back while they.re at it) as greatest hits waft through the background.

There.s certainly an interesting case to be make here: that Lennon and Yoko Ono (featured prominently among the talking heads) utilized their celebrity in a genuinely unprecedented manner to create performance art as a form of social commentary. Their extra-musical careers did indeed show moments of brilliance, grabbing public attention with their antics, placing blunt, anti-establishment, humanitarian slogans at the forefront, while sometimes incorporating a more sophisticated message into the subtext.

Due to such activities.and due to an even greater degree to their association with the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Black Panthers.the US government took great interest in Lennon and Ono, at least enough to illegally wire-tap their phone, erect a tower of frowning memos and spend several years and untold dollars trying to deport Lennon, who, naturally, turned the whole thing into a media circus.

These facts, already established elsewhere, aren.t elaborated on very much in The US vs John Lennon, though testaments from guys like G Gordon Liddy do make for a few fun and unexpected highlights. A few lesser-known details.such as Lennon.s plan to join free concerts that were to occur right outside of the 1972 Republican National Convention .are good starting points that just don.t get fleshed out.

The result of all this is a film that makes good reference material for kids or anyone who.s just awoke from a 30-year coma. For the rest of us, it makes for diverting, generic television.which, being a VH1 production, is probably what it was supposed to be in the first place.whose primary saving grace is the presence of Lennon himself, that singular charmer and provocateur who also happened to make some of the best rock .n. roll we.ve ever known. V

Opens Fri, Oct 26
The US vs John Lennon
Written & directed by David Leaf,
John Scheinfeld
Featuring Yoko Ono, Gore Vidal,
Walter Cronkite, Angela Davis

http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=5003

more truth is found here:

http://www.google.de/search?q=lennon+conspiracy

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posted by u2r2h at 5:15 PM 0 comments

Iranian Minister Homayoun: 9/11 plane impacts "a make-believe scene"


9/11 incident, a make-believe: official

Moscow, Oct 27, IRNA

Iran-Russia-Dialogue
An Iranian official here on Friday mocked the 9/11 story presented to the world public opinion by the US.

"What we watched on the TVs regarding slamming of two planes into the New York Twin Towers, was in fact a make-believe scene," said Iran's Deputy Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister and head of Iran's Culture, Art and Communications Research Center Mohammad-Hadi Homayoun in an address to the Iran-Russia Dialogue among Civilizations Conference in Moscow.

Homayoun stipulated that the sky-scrappers were destroyed through bomb explosions, adding that after massive media propaganda of the US the crusades began.

Criticizing Hountington's theory of Clashes among Civilizations, Homayoun said the theory was formed to justify clashes and tensions among civilizations and cultures.

Meanwhile, touching on a quarter-a-century chronology of the globalization process, Iran's Presidential advisor Mohammad Nahavandian told the audience for his part that global village is in need of human relations more than satellites and the internet.

"Communications are today only responsible for preparing the technical ground for the relations; and as long as there is no cultural cooperation, there will be clashes among civilizations," announced Nahavandian.

Accusing the US and the Zionist regime of adventurism and of opposing the idea of dialogue among civilizations, Nahavandian said that Iran and Russia are advocates of dialogue among civilizations and cultures.

He called for expansion of cooperation between Tehran and Moscow for promotion of democracy on the international level.








News sent: 20:12 Friday October 27, 2006 Print

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posted by u2r2h at 1:56 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

USA turning its back on Enlightenment -- The New Normal

The new normal

Despite the exponential increases in public education and access to
information in the past century, the quality of political debate in
the United States, Britain and Australia, appears to have become
increasingly unsophisticated. This is appealing to the lowest common
denominator of understanding, in sharp contrast to the subtle and
nuanced words used by Abraham Lincoln nearly 150 years ago.

On 27 February 1860, Lincoln delivered a very complex speech about
slavery and its political implications at the Cooper Union in New York
City. It was his first speech in New York and its impact was dramatic.
He concluded with the words, which may seem anachronistic now, 'Let us
have faith that right makes might...' Four New York newspapers
published the full text, all 7500 words, and it was reprinted in
hundreds of different formats. The speech rapidly transformed Lincoln
from being merely a Mid-Western 'favourite son' to a national figure,
and was a major factor in securing him the Republican nomination for
President in May.

In 1860 the technology was primitive but the ideas in Lincoln's speech
were profound and sophisticated. In the year 2000 the technology was
sophisticated but the ideas uttered by the Presidential candidates
Bush and Gore were primitive and over simplified: it would be easier
to imagine a mantra, such as 'We have made America stronger", being
repeated a hundred times rather than to have a complex argument
presented once. George W. Bush's central theme was essentially an
inversion of Lincoln's: "Might makes us right. If we can do it, we
must'.

On 21 October 2001, Vice- President Dick Cheney, in justifying use of
Executive power to restrict civil liberties, limit access to courts,
restrict debate and cripple Freedom of Information legislation told
The Washington Post: 'Many of the steps we have now been forced to
take will become permanent in American life, part of a new normalcy
that reflects an understanding of the world as it is'.
In the United States, writers are now adopting, and some promoting,
the term the 'new normal. In this view, the 'old normal', where
decisions might have been based on evidence, analysis, reason and
judgment, using techniques refined by the Enlightenment of the 18th
century, had come to an end on September 11. The 'new normal' depends
on instant decisions based on 'gut', 'instinct' and 'faith'.
Increasingly, policies have to be 'faith based'.

On 17 September 2006, the Google search engine listed 614,000,000
citations of the 'new normal', but the term has had virtually no
currency or recognition outside the United States.

Under the 'new normal' a belief that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction was enough to justify invasion and the priority was for
immediate action, not for understanding or judgement. Control of
Iraq's huge oil reserves, which would have been a completely rational
(but not morally uplifting) reason for invasion, was never mentioned.
If Iraq had been the world's greatest producer of broccoli, Saddam,
for all his hideous cruelty, would not have been disturbed.
Under the 'old normal' before September 11, 2001, I assumed that our
side, the democracies, never began wars (although, as in Vietnam, they
were prepared to intervene in existing colonial struggles), even where
our opponents were brutal and corrupt and when a pre-emptive strike
might have been to our strategic advantage. This assumption no longer
applies, and the moral basis for action is now displaced by sheer
opportunism adventurism. Torture is now routinely justified instead of
being outlawed. The arguments 'We only torture in a good cause' and
'If they can do it, so can we...' should have been dismissed out of
hand, but were not. We should have asked: 'How are torturers
recruited? Self-selection? Going with the flow? Does the Eichmann
defence of 'superior orders' apply?'

Albert Camus wrote: 'Man's greatness lies in his decision to be
stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has
only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself'.

Barry Jones former Australian Labor politician
his book: A Thinking Reed ISBN 1 74114 387 X

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/perspective/stories/2006/1771236.htm

more info: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17489

http://www.google.com/q=%22Mark+Crispin+Miller%22+elections+fraud+kerry+ohio

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posted by u2r2h at 4:34 PM 1 comments

2006 mid term elections -- Are fair elections more important than 911 truth?

Welcome to http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/

RIGHT MAKES MIGHT says Honest Abe
http://slowreads.com/ReviewHolzerLincolnCooperUnion.htm

Might makes Right .. says the current administration.

Last night I heard this short, sweet MP3 commentary (Barry Jones):
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/guide/141.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/perspective/stories/2006/1771236.htm#transcript
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/pve_20061023.mp3

<a
href="http://search.abc.net.au//search/search.cgi?form=perspective&num_tiers=1&num_ranks=20&collection=rn&query=capitalist&form=perspective&meta_v=%2Brn%2Fperspective%2Fstories">Other
interesting commentaries</a>

More depressing details:
Politics in the 'New Normal' America
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17489

Most important:

STOLEN ELECTIONS
"The Right will steal the next one too - unless we stop them."
Professor Mark Crispin Miller, NYU
http://www.tucradio.org/new.html

================

None Dare Call It Stolen

Ohio, the election, and America's servile press

Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2005.

What actually happened in Ohio in 2004.

An excerpt from this report appeared in August 2005.

The complete text appears below. Originally from August 2005. By Mark
Crispin Miller.

Whichever candidate you voted for (or think you voted for), or even if you
did not vote (or could not vote), you must admit that last year's
presidential race was—if nothing else—pretty interesting. True, the press
has dropped the subject, and the Democrats, with very few exceptions, have
“moved on.” Yet this contest may have been the most unusual in U.S.
history; it was certainly among those with the strangest outcomes. You may
remember being surprised yourself. The infamously factious Democrats were
fiercely unified—Ralph Nader garnered only about 0.38 percent of the
national vote—while the Republicans were split, with a vocal anti-Bush
front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr of Georgia; Ike's son
John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of Staff and onetime “Veteran
for Bush” General Merrill “Tony” McPeak; founding neocon Francis Fukuyama;
Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various large alliances of military
officers, diplomats, and business professors. The American Conservative,
co-founded by Pat Buchanan, endorsed five candidates for president,
including both Bush and Kerry, while the Financial Times and The Economist
came out for Kerry alone. At least fifty-nine daily newspapers that backed
Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or no one) in this election.
The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another
unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House. [1] Yet
this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals
and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president
somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

How did he do it? To that most important question the commentariat,
briskly prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith—a
silent majority heretofore unmoved by any other politician—had poured
forth by the millions to vote “Yes!” for Jesus' buddy in the White House.
Bush's 51 percent, according to this thesis, were roused primarily by
“family values.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council,
called gay marriage “the hood ornament on the family values wagon that
carried the president to a second term.” The pundits eagerly pronounced
their amens—“Moral values,” Tucker Carlson said on CNN, “drove President
Bush and other Republican candidates to victory this week”—although it is
not clear why. The primary evidence of our Great Awakening was a
post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in which 27 percent of the
respondents, when asked which issue “mattered most” to them in the
election, selected something called “moral values.” This slight plurality
of impulse becomes still less impressive when we note that, as the
pollsters went to great pains to make clear, “the relative importance of
moral values depends greatly on how the question is framed.” In fact, when
voters were asked to “name in their own words the most important factor in
their vote,” only 14 percent managed to come up with “moral values.”
Strangely, this detail went little mentioned in the post-electoral
commentary.[2]

The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the
election—except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them. This
animus appeared soon after November 2, in a spate of caustic articles
dismissing any critical discussion of the outcome as crazed speculation:
“Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,”
chuckled the Baltimore Sun on November 5. “Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is
Dismissed,” proclaimed the Boston Globe on November 10. “Latest Conspiracy
Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” the Washington Post chortled on November
11. The New York Times weighed in with “Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by
Blogs, Are Quickly Buried”—making mock not only of the “post-election
theorizing” but of cyberspace itself, the fons et origo of all such loony
tunes, according to the Times.

Such was the news that most Americans received. Although the tone was
scientific, “realistic,” skeptical, and “middle-of-the-road,” the
explanations offered by the press were weak and immaterial. It was as if
they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the
fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire.[3] Since Kerry has
conceded, they argued, and since “no smoking gun” had come to light, there
was no story to report. This is an oddly passive argument. Even so, the
evidence that something went extremely wrong last fall is copious, and not
hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit by local papers and
haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the evidence is
lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for the last
half-year, has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is a
veritable arsenal of “smoking guns”—and yet its findings may be less
extraordinary than the fact that no one in this country seems to care
about them.

* * *

On January 5, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking
Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released Preserving Democracy:
What Went Wrong in Ohio. The report was the result of a five-week
investigation by the committee's Democrats, who reviewed thousands of
complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or incompetence surrounding the election
in Ohio, and further thousands of complaints that poured in by phone and
email as word of the inquiry spread. The congressional researchers were
assisted by volunteers in Ohio who held public hearings in Columbus,
Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati, and questioned more than two hundred
witnesses. (Although they were invited, Republicans chose not to join in
the inquiry.) [4]

Preserving Democracy describes three phases of Republican chicanery: the
run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election
cover-up. The wrongs exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney
also went in heavily for those) but specific violations of the U.S. and
Ohio constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968,
the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act.
Although Conyers trod carefully when the report came out, insisting that
the crimes did not affect the outcome of the race (a point he had to make,
he told me, “just to get a hearing”), his report does “raise grave doubts
regarding whether it can be said that the Ohio electors selected on
December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let
alone Federal requirements and constitutional standards.” The report cites
“massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies” throughout
the state—wrongs, moreover, that were hardly random accidents. “In many
cases,” the report says, “these irregularities were caused by intentional
misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State
J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.”[5]

The first phase of malfeasance entailed, among many other actions, several
months of bureaucratic hijinks aimed at disenfranchising Democrats, the
most spectacular result of which was “a wide discrepancy between the
availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban
areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas.” Such
unequal placement had the predictable effect of slowing the voting process
to a crawl at Democratic polls, while making matters quick and easy in
Bush country: a clever way to cancel out the Democrats' immense success at
registering new voters in Ohio. (We cannot know the precise number of new
voters registered in Ohio by either party because many states, including
Ohio, do not register voters by party affiliation. The New York Times
reported in September, however, that new registration rose 25 percent in
Ohio's predominantly Republican precincts and 250 percent in Ohio's
predominantly Democratic precincts.)

At Kenyon College in Gambier, for instance, there were only two machines
for 1,300 would-be voters, even though “a surge of late registrations
promised a record vote.” Gambier residents and Kenyon students had to
stand in line for hours, in the rain and in “crowded, narrow hallways,”
with some of them inevitably forced to call it quits. “In contrast, at
nearby Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, which is considered more Republican
leaning, there were ample waiting machines and no lines.” This was not a
consequence of limited resources. In Franklin County alone, as voters
stood for hours throughout Columbus and elsewhere, at least 125 machines
collected dust in storage. The county's election officials had “decided to
make do with 2,866 machines, even though the analysis showed that the
county needs 5,000 machines.”

It seemed at times that Ohio's secretary of state was determined to try
every stunt short of levying a poll tax to suppress new voter turnout. On
September 7, based on an overzealous reading of an obscure state bylaw, he
ordered county boards of elections to reject all Ohio voter-registration
forms not “printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text
weight.” Under public pressure he reversed the order three weeks later, by
which time unknown numbers of Ohioans had been disenfranchised. Blackwell
also attempted to limit access to provisional ballots. The Help America
Vote Act—passed in 2002 to address some of the problems of the 2000
election—prevents election officials from deciding at the polls who will
be permitted to cast provisional ballots, as earlier Ohio law had
permitted. On September 16, Blackwell issued a directive that somehow
failed to note that change. A federal judge ordered him to revise the
language, Blackwell resisted, and the court was forced to draft its own
version of the directive, which it ordered Blackwell to accept, even as it
noted Blackwell's “vigorous, indeed, at times, obdurate opposition” to
compliance with the law.

Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still
more Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The party
sent registered letters to new voters, “then sought to challenge 35,000
individuals who refused to sign for the letters,” including “voters who
were homeless, serving abroad, or simply did not want to sign for
something concerning the Republican Party.” It should be noted that
marketers have long used zip codes to target, with remarkable precision,
the ethnic makeup of specific neighborhoods, and also that, according to
exit polls last year, 84 percent of those black citizens who voted in Ohio
voted for Kerry.[6]

* * *

The second phase of lawlessness began the Monday before the election, when
Blackwell issued two directives restricting media coverage of the
election. First, reporters were to be barred from the polls, because their
presence contravened Ohio's law on “loitering” near voting places. Second,
media representatives conducting exit polls were to remain 100 feet away
from the polls. Blackwell's reasoning here was that, with voter turnout
estimated at 73 percent, and with many new voters so blissfully ignorant
as to have “never looked at a voting machine before,” his duty was clear:
the public was to be protected from the “interference or intimidation”
caused by “intense media scrutiny.” Both cases were at once struck down in
federal court on First Amendment grounds.

Blackwell did manage to ban reporters from a post-election ballot-counting
site in Warren County because—election officials claimed—the FBI had
warned of an impending terrorist attack there. The FBI said it issued no
such warning, however, and the officials refused to name the agent who
alerted them. Moreover, as the Cincinnati Enquirer later reported, email
correspondence between election officials and the county's building
services director indicated that lockdown plans—“down to the wording of
the signs that would be posted on the locked doors”—had been in the works
for at least a week. Beyond suggesting that officials had something to
hide, the ban was also, according to the report, a violation of Ohio law
and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Contrary to a prior understanding, Blackwell also kept foreign monitors
away from the Ohio polls. Having been formally invited by the State
Department on June 9, observers from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, an international consortium based in Vienna, had
come to witness and report on the election. The mission's two-man teams
had been approved to monitor the process in eleven states—but the
observers in Ohio were prevented from watching the opening of the polling
places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election
itself. “We thought we could be at the polling places before, during, and
after” the voting, said Søren Søndergaard, a Danish member of the team.
Denied admission to polls in Columbus, he and his partner went to
Blackwell, who refused them letters of approval, again citing Ohio law
banning “loitering” outside the polls. The two observers therefore had to
“monitor” the voting at a distance of 100 feet from each polling place.
Although not technically illegal, Blackwell's refusal was improper and, of
course, suspicious. (The Conyers report does not deal with this episode.)

To what end would election officials risk so malodorous an action? We can
only guess, of course. We do know, however, that Ohio, like the nation,
was the site of numerous statistical anomalies—so many that the number is
itself statistically anomalous, since every single one of them took votes
from Kerry. In Butler County the Democratic candidate for State Supreme
Court took in 5,347 more votes than Kerry did. In Cuyahoga County ten
Cleveland precincts “reported an incredibly high number of votes for third
party candidates who have historically received only a handful of votes
from these urban areas”—mystery votes that would mostly otherwise have
gone to Kerry. In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes
from one computer, and, in Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared
in Bush's column after all precincts had reported. In Perry County the
number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters,
leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown, perhaps
to make up the difference, reported negative 25 million votes.

In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the
arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their
respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast, as in West
Palm Beach back in 2000. In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president—
representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate—mysteriously dropped out
of the final count. The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept
going haywire, prompting the county's election director to admit that
prior tests of the machines had failed. One polling place in Lucas County
never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no one
had the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a
Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph
Nader's name off many ballots, also happened to remove John Kerry's name.
The Washington Post reported that in Mahoning County “25 electronic
machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column,”
but it did not think to ask why.

Ohio Democrats also were heavily thwarted through dirty tricks recalling
Richard Nixon's reign and the systematic bullying of Dixie. There were
“literally thousands upon thousands” of such incidents, the Conyers report
notes, cataloguing only the grossest cases. Voters were told, falsely,
that their polling place had changed; the news was conveyed by phone
calls, “door-hangers,” and even party workers going door to door. There
were phone calls and fake “voter bulletins” instructing Democrats that
they were not to cast their votes until Wednesday, November 3, the day
after Election Day. Unknown “volunteers” in Cleveland showed up at the
homes of Democrats, kindly offering to “deliver” completed absentee
ballots to the election office. And at several polling places, election
personnel or hired goons bused in to do the job “challenged” voters—black
voters in particular—to produce documents confirming their eligibility to
vote. The report notes one especially striking incident:
In Franklin County, a worker at a Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people
who called themselves the “Texas Strike Force” using payphones to make
intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the
prison system. The “Texas Strike Force” paid their way to Ohio, but their
hotel accommodations were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose
headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller
threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to
jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did
nothing.

* * *

The electoral fraud continued past Election Day, but by means far more
complex and less apparent than the bullying that marked the day itself.
Here the aim was to protect the spoils, which required the prevention of
countywide hand recounts by any means necessary. The procedure for
recounts is quite clear. In fact, it was created by Blackwell. A recount
having been approved, each of the state's eighty-eight counties must
select a number of precincts randomly, so that the total of their ballots
comes to 3 percent (at least) of the county's total vote. Those ballots
must then be simultaneously hand counted and machine counted. If the hand
count and the new machine count match, the remaining 97 percent of the
selected ballots may be counted by machine. If, however, the totals vary
by as little as a single vote, all the other votes must be hand counted,
and the results, once reconfirmed, must be accepted as the new official
total.

The Ohio recount officially started on December 13—five days after
Conyers's hearings opened—and was scheduled to go on until December 28.
Because the recount (such as it was) coincided with the inquiry, Conyers
was able to discover, and reveal in his report, several instances of what
seemed to be electoral fraud.

On December 13, for instance, Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections
for Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that
operates the tabulating machine had been “modified” by one Michael Barbian
Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county's
voting machinery.
Ms. Eaton witnessed Mr. Barbian modify the Hocking County computer vote
tabulator before the announcement of the Ohio recount. She further
witnessed Barbian, upon the announcement that the Hocking County precinct
was planned to be the subject of the initial Ohio test recount, make
further alterations based on his knowledge of the situation. She also has
firsthand knowledge that Barbian advised election officials how to
manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount
matched the machine count.[7]

The committee also learned that Triad similarly intervened in at least two
other counties. In a filmed interview, Barbian said that he had examined
machines not only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark,
Harrison, and Guernsey counties; his purpose was to provide the Board of
Elections with as much information as possible—“The more information you
give someone,” he said, “the better job they can do.” The report concludes
that such information as Barbian and his colleagues could provide was
helpful indeed:
Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad
employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a
course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the
ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for
each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to
match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full
county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would
frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law—to randomly ascertain if
the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if
not to conduct a full hand recount.

The report notes Triad's role in several other cases. In Union County the
hard drive on one tabulator was replaced after the election. (The old one
had to be subpoenaed.) In Monroe County, after the 3 percent hand count
had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a
new machine and took away the old one. (That machine's count matched the
hand count.) Such operations are especially worrying in light of the fact
that Triad's founder, Brett A. Rapp, “has been a consistent contributor to
Republican causes.” (Neither Barbian nor Rapp would respond to Harper's
queries, and the operator at Triad refused even to provide the name of a
press liaison.)

There were many cases of malfeasance, however, in which Triad played no
role. Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers, led by Green
Party recount manager Lynne Serpe, monitored the count throughout Ohio.[8]
They reported that: In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton,
Summit, and Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount
were preselected, not picked at random, as the law requires. In Fairfield
County the 3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the
machine count—but despite protests from observers, officials did not then
perform a hand recount of all the ballots, as the law requires. In
Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered, apparently
to ensure that the hand recount would equal the machine count. In Ashland,
Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or
stored. Belmont County “hired an independent programmer (‘at great
expense’) to reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count
votes for President during the recount.” Finally, Democratic and/or Green
observers were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or
were not allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam,
Allen, Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan
counties. In short, the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as
required by Ohio law.

* * *

That is what the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee found,
that is what they distributed to everyone in Congress, and that is what
any member of the national press could have reported at any time in the
last half year. Conyers may or may not have precisely captured every
single dirty trick. The combined votes gained by the Republicans through
such devices may or may not have decided the election. (Bush won Ohio by
118,601 votes.) Indeed, if you could somehow look into the heart of every
eligible voter in the United States to know his or her truest wishes, you
might discover that Bush/Cheney was indeed the people's choice. But you
have to admit—the report is pretty interesting.

In fact, its release was timed for maximum publicity. According to the
United States Code (Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15), the President of the
Senate—i.e., the U.S. Vice President—must announce each state's electoral
results, then “call for objections.” Objections must be made in writing
and “signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of
Representatives.” A challenge having been submitted, the joint proceedings
must then be suspended so that both houses can retire to their respective
chambers to decide the question, after which they reconvene and either
certify or reject the vote.

Thus was an unprecedented civic drama looming on the day that Conyers's
report appeared. First of all, electoral votes had been contested in the
Congress only twice. In 1877 the electoral votes of several states were
challenged, some by Democrats supporting Samuel Tilden, others by
Republicans supporting Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1969, Republicans
challenged the North Carolina vote when Lloyd W. Bailey, a “faithless
elector” pledged to Richard Nixon for that state, voted for George
Wallace.[9] And a new challenge would be more than just “historic.”
Because of what had happened—or not happened—four years earlier, it would
also be extraordinarily suspenseful. On January 6, 2001, House Democrats,
galvanized by the electoral larceny in Florida, tried and failed to
challenge the results. Their effort was aborted by the failure of a single
Democratic senator to join them, as the law requires. Al Gore—still vice
president, and therefore still the Senate's president—had urged Democrats
to make no such unseemly waves but to respect Bush's installation for the
sake of national unity. Now, it seemed, that partisan disgrace would be
redressed, at least symbolically; for a new challenge from the House, by
Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, would be co-signed by
Barbara Boxer, Democratic senator from California, who, at a noon press
conference on January 6, heightened the suspense by tearfully
acknowledging her prior wrong: “Four years ago I didn't intervene. I was
asked by Al Gore not to do so and I didn't do so. Frankly, looking back on
it, I wish I had.”

It was a story perfect for TV—a rare event, like the return of Halley's
comet; a scene of high contention in the nation's capital; a heroine
resolved to make things right, both for the public and herself. Such big
news would highlight Conyers's report, whose findings, having spurred the
challenge in the first place, would now inform the great congressional
debate on the election in Ohio.

As you may recall, this didn't happen—the challenge was rejected by a vote
of 267‒31 in the House and 74‒1 in the Senate. The Boston Globe gave the
report 118 words (page 3); the Los Angeles Times, 60 words (page 18). It
made no news in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, or
U.S. News & World Report. It made no news on CBS, NBC, ABC, or PBS. Nor
did NPR report it (though Talk of the Nation dealt with it on January 6).
CNN did not report it, though Donna Brazile pointedly affirmed its copious
“evidence” on Inside Politics on January 6. (Judy Woodruff failed to pause
for an elaboration.) Also on that date, the Fox News Channel briefly
showed Conyers himself discussing “irregularities” in Franklin County,
though it did not mention the report. He was followed by Tom DeLay, who
assailed the Democrats for their “assault against the institutions of our
representative democracy.” The New York Times negated both the challenge
and the document in a brief item headlined “Election Results to Be
Certified, with Little Fuss from Kerry,” which ran on page 16 and ended
with this quote from Dennis Hastert's office, vis-à-vis the Democrats:
“They are really just trying to stir up their loony left.”

Indeed, according to the House Republicans, it was the Democrats who were
the troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning “fantasies” and
“conspiracy theories” to “distract” the people, “poison the atmosphere of
the House of Representatives” (Dave Hobson, R., Ohio), and “undermine the
prospect of democracy” (David Dreier, R., Calif.); mounting “a direct
attack to undermine our democracy” (Tom DeLay, R., Tex.), “an assault
against the institutions of our representative democracy” (DeLay); trying
“to plant the insidious seeds of doubt in the electoral process” (J. D.
Hayworth, R., Ariz.); and in so doing following “their party's primary
strategy: to obstruct, to divide and to destroy” (Deborah D. Pryce, R.,
Ohio).

Furthermore, the argument went, there was no evidence of electoral fraud.
The Democrats were using “baseless and meritless tactics” (Pryce) to
present their “so-called evidence” (Bob Ney, R., Ohio), “making
allegations that have no basis of fact” (Candice Miller, R., Mich.),
making claims for which “there is no evidence whatsoever, no evidence
whatsoever” (Dreier). “There is absolutely no credible basis to question
the outcome of the election” (Rob Portman, R., Ohio). “No proven
allegations of fraud. No reports of widespread wrongdoing. It was, at the
end of the day, an honest election” (Bill Shuster, R., Pa.). And so on.
Bush won Ohio by “an overwhelming and comfortable margin,” Rep. Pryce
insisted, while Ric Keller (R., Fla.) said that Bush won by “an
overwhelmingly comfortable margin.” (“The president's margin is
significant,” observed Roy Blunt, R., Mo.) In short, as Tom DeLay put it,
“no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004—and,
for that matter, the election of 2000. Everybody knows it. The voters know
it, the candidates know it, the courts know it, and the evidence proves
it.”

That all this commentary was simply wrong went unnoticed and/or
unreported. Once Bush was re-inaugurated, all inquiries were apparently
concluded, and the story was officially kaput. By March talk of fraud was
calling forth the same reflexive ridicule that had prevailed back in
November—but only now and then, on those rare moments when somebody dared
bring it up: “Also tonight,” CNN's Lou Dobbs deadpanned ironically on
March 8, “Teresa Heinz Kerry still can't accept certain reality. She
suggests the presidential election may have been rigged!” And when, on
March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study
demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news
only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.[10] The article included this response
from Carlo LoParo, Kenneth Blackwell's spokesman: “What are you going to
do except laugh at it?”

* * *

In the summer of 2003, Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.) was
interviewed by Alexandra Pelosi at a barbecue on the White House lawn for
her HBO documentary Diary of a Political Tourist. “It's already over. The
election's over. We won,” King exulted more than a year before the
election. When asked by Pelosi—the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi—how he knew that Bush would win, he answered, “It's all over but
the counting. And we'll take care of the counting.”

King, who is well known in Washington for his eccentric utterances, says
he was kidding, that he has known Pelosi for years, that she is “a clown,”
and that her project was a “spoof.” Still, he said it. And laughter,
despite the counsel of Kenneth Blackwell's press flack, seems an
inappropriate response to the prospect of a stolen election—as does the
advice that we “get over it.” The point of the Conyers report, and of this
report as well, is not to send Bush packing and put Kerry in his place.
The Framers could no more conceive of electoral fraud on such a scale than
they could picture Fox News Channel or the Pentagon; and so we have no
constitutional recourse, should it be proven, finally, that the wrong guy
“won.” The point of our revisiting the last election, rather, is to see
exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate
reforms. Those who say we should “move on” from that suspicious race and
work instead on “bigger issues”—like electoral reform—are urging the
impossible; for there has never been a great reform that was not driven by
some major scandal.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,”
Thomas Jefferson said, “it expects what never was and never will be.” That
much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since “the
news” has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove's fevered dreams.
Just as 2+2=5 in Orwell's Oceania, so here today the United States just
won two brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented,
we live in a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year's presidential
race “was, at the end of the day, an honest election.” Such claims,
presented as the truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid
as the notions that one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don't
prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago.

In this nation's epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and
democracy, the press has unilaterally disarmed—and therefore many good
Americans, both liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise
of self-government. That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if
we face it, and endeavor to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This
democracy can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive
is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot
has succeeded.
About the Author

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon and, most
recently, Cruel and Unusual. His next book, Fooled Again, will be
published this fall by Basic Books.
Notes

1.

The print version of “None Dare Call It Stolen” contained the following
line, which was incorrect: “on Election Day, twenty-six state exit polls
incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry.” The correct number was five states.
Although we regret the error, the context surrounding it bears further
explanation.

The mistake was brought to our attention by a letter from Warren Mitofsky,
founder of Mitofsky International, which, along with partner Edison Media
Research, has conducted exit polls of every presidential contest since
1996. In the letter, Mr. Mitofsky stated that not only was the figure for
twenty-six states incorrect, so, too, was the assertion that
Edison/Mitofsky's exit polling contained any mistakes whatsoever. “One
hundred-twenty-three races for President, Senator, Governor, and
propositions,” Mr. Mitofsky wrote, “were called without error.” He further
attributed our misstep to “confusing the reports by bloggers with the exit
poll my partner and I did.”

Perhaps. But a closer inspection of what Mr. Mitofsky actually means by
“called without error” could indicate otherwise. On January 19, 2005,
Edison/Mitofsky released a report that, while continuing to maintain that
no election projection mistakes were made, did acknowledge the existence
of serious “differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual
vote count.” In thirty states, the voter estimates produced by
Edison/Mitofsky data was wrong to a statistically significant degree
(twenty-six states for Kerry, four for Bush). Our mistake came in failing
to recognize that in twenty-one of the twenty-six instances in which the
estimates incorrectly named Kerry as the front-runner, he ultimately
carried the state, only by a smaller margin than indicated by the exit
polls. Still, an apparent logical disconnect would seem to exist. How
could the estimates be wrong but not the final projection? To answer this
question, a clear picture of the difference between estimates and final
projections is needed.

On Election Day, exit poll interviewers submit their results to
Edison/Mitofsky three times, during regularly scheduled “calls,” the last
of which comes shortly before the close of the polls. These results do not
contain official vote numbers, which is important. Many people would
assume that Edison/Mitofsky's final projections exclusively utilize the
information collected at the polls and sent in during the calls; however,
this is not the process. Edison/Mitofsky's report makes clear that it does
not “rely solely on exit polls in its computations and estimates.” When
the voting is complete, actual vote numbers are combined with the exit
poll responses and “as in past elections, the final exit poll data used
for analysis . . . [is] adjusted to match the actual vote returns.” So,
even if the exit poll estimates are erroneous, Edison/Mitofsky still isn't
wrong-because they just add in the actual vote numbers to ensure
everything checks.

This practice is by no means secret, although perhaps the average voter or
election-night network-television watcher might not have been aware of it.
I certainly wasn't. Maybe knowing this should serve to highlight the risks
of viewing exit polls as a hedge against improprieties in the vote count.
Or perhaps that is precisely the best use for them. The chances that the
state exit poll estimates erred by such a wide margin was one 1 in 16.5
million, according to a study by the National Election Data Archive
Project. One final key point remains: of the five states Edison/Mitofsky
had Kerry leading that he eventually lost, Ohio was one. — Theodore Ross
[Back]

2. Another poll, by Zogby International, showed that 33 percent of voters
deemed “greed and materialism” the most pressing moral problems in
America. Only 12 percent of those polled cited gay marriage. [Back]

3. Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, stood out as an heroic exception, devoting
many segments of his nightly program Countdown to the myriad signs of
electoral mischief, particularly in Ohio. [Back]

4.

The full report can be downloaded from the Judiciary Committee's website
at www.house.gov/judiciary_ democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf and is also,
as of May, available as a trade paperback, entitled What Went Wrong in
Ohio. I should note here that, in a victory for family values, the
publishers of that paperback are my parents, Jordan and Anita Miller.
[Back]

5. When contacted by Harper's Magazine, Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo
dismissed Conyers's report as a partisan attack. “Why wasn't it more than
an hour's story?” he asked, referring to the lack of media interest in the
report. “Everybody can't be wrong, can they?” [Back]

6. Let it not be said that the Democrats rose wholly above the electoral
fray: in Defiance County, Ohio, one Chad Staton was arrested on 130 counts
of vote fraud when he submitted voter-registration forms purportedly
signed by, among others, Dick Tracy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Michael Jackson, and
Mary Poppins. Of course, depending on party affiliation, the consequence
of election misdeeds varies. Staton, who told police he was paid in crack
for each registration, received fifty-four months in jail for his
fifth-degree felonies; Blackwell, for his part, is now the G.O.P.
front-runner for governor of Ohio. [Back]

7. In May 2005, Eaton was ordered by the Hocking County Board of Elections
to resign from her position. [Back]

8. The recount itself was the result of a joint application from the Green
and Libertarian parties. [Back]

9. Offended by the president-elect's first cabinet appointments (Henry
Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et al.), Bailey was protesting Nixon's
liberalism. [Back]

10. On the other hand, the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been
reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago
Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch,
CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC (which devoted a Nightline segment to the
“conspiracy theory” that the exit polls had been correct). [Back]
This is None Dare Call It Stolen, originally from August 2005, published
Wednesday, September 7, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of
Harpers.org.

http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html

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Thursday, October 19, 2006

The case Zammar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Haydar_Zammar

original in German: http://www.0815-info.de/archiv/2006/oktober/53495198610f51905.php

BabelFish translation:


The dangerous prisoner from Damascus is a political time bomb for the establishment

by Daniel Neun

Syria. By a coincidence a felt key figure of the assassination attempts from 11 September emerged again from sinking: the German citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar called his name before a Syrian public security court and indicated, he originated from Germany, thus medium reports. This monitored coincidentally a present European Union civil servant, who along-pursue by routine such processes. Zammar is threatened, because of membership into the forbidden Muslim brotherhood, with the death-penalty(1). Not only the fact that a German is to be tortured quietly and secretly, somewhere in prisons of the Syrian MAD (german military secret service) partner service, thus the military secret service, imprisoned, and now to death condemned, makes the thing so explosively - Zammar is the living proof and witness of the facts around the "El Kaida" cell in that Hamburg Marienstrasse and the whole "Islamic terrorist Carpet Knife Boeing -- whammo into World trade centers" - hijack-job. Which already reported a multiplicity of good-civil media, what after appearance under the imposed Hypnose sedative formula of the German public named "conspiracy theory" fell however immediately, is the actual core of the legal and political explosive device, which becomes without doubt lift-off sometime: Mohammed Haydar Zammar was since the 90s under observation of the German and US-American secret services and with it the entire "terror cell" from Mohammed Atta (2). I.e., those assassination attempts of 11.9. were not prevented obviously also by German security authorities at least, although this would have been possible.Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations, Syria, US secret services and the torture prison According to www.spiegel.de on-line one from 04 March 2006 was determined Mohammed Haydar Zammar after a direct reference Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations to the FBI from 26 November 2001, where place of residence and flight data Zammars were conveyed, in Morocco by local authorities under US participation. Zammar was brought afterwards into the notorious torture prison Far`Falastin of the Syrian military secret service in Damascus, where he was heavily tortured obviously over years. On 14 December 2005 it was officially confirmed that also Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations officials Zammar cross-examined there (3).Already on 31 January 2003 the Washington post office reported of a German, to which in in Far'Falastins cellars one kept imprisoned (4). The conditions are described as follows there: a cage, rat-contaminates, without light, 1x1 meter long and broadly and less than two meters highly. The prisoners only taken out,um to be cross-examined or tortured. The German would have been identified to Mohammed Haydar Zammar by altogether five Mitgefangenen... it was clear. "it is a terrible place", like that that 38-jaehrige Maroccan Driss is Lakoul at that time 2003 to Washington the post office. The cries of tortures would be constantly audible, it are gladly over it, only with electrical cables on the soles to have been struck. Again to the memory: the Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations is a police authority and is subject to judicial control. And judicial control is subject to the protecting power of the weaker ones - the Basic Law.Nobody stands over the Basic Law. The Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations admitted Zammar in Far'Falastin ' to have cross-examined. Why were these "officials" arrested not immediately? Why did the German authorities Zammar let leave the country despite verhoeren after the assassination attempts from 11 September on 27 October 2001, how it likewise reports the Washington post office from 31 January 2003?The Syrian businessman and the "terror cell" We reported already some time ago (s. "the Psychokrieg I+II (5)(2)) on attempts to design a connection between the luggage bomb plot," the El Kaida"Terrorzelle and alleged airplane assassination attempts in London with Energydrinks.

Again and again in the center of the happening: the ex German Federal Armed Forces soldier Said Bahaji. It was since 1 November 1998 inhabitants of the notorious Hamburg Marienstrasse, like Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh (6). Nevertheless the "protection of the constitution" (thus the inland secret service) stated, it of connections between Atta and Bahaji would have never heard. Also the agents wagged the index finger, when it concerned a further ominoese figure of the sogannten "El Kaida" and the terror cell into the Marienstrasse: the mysterioesen Syrian businessman Mamoun Darkazanli.

According to newspaper reports this possessed an authority over the account of the presumed chief of finances is shop Mamdouh Mahmud Salim possessed, over which the flying hours of the assassins were paid. The Federal Prosecutor's Office (BAW) had let two days after the assassination attempts in New York and Washington an account from Darkazanli with that Hamburg savings bank (HASPA) close, such a report Hamburg evening papers. In addition the name Darkazanli had emerged on a list with 27 organizations, whose accounts in the USA because of terror suspicion closed were. Nevertheless the BAW disclaimed all reproaches against Darkazanli and let it run (7).

The special-purpose force "Able Danger" of the US military secret service dia.According to realizations, which came in the course of the "Able Danger" affair in the USA to the light of the public, the 9/11-Verschwoerer and ex German Federal Armed Forces soldier Said Bahaji had very probably contact with the Syrian businessman Darkazanli, and not only: Bahaji arrived allegedly straight by the contact at Darkazanli 1998 into the visor of the German agents, who then got realizations over Attas group, valuable by the "Observation" Bahajis, (8). Bahaji, which was allowed to leave the country despite clear references to the German authorities and relevant passport notes after 11.9. from Germany, by the way disappeared up to the today's day.The sources of this message, information from dozens of congress hearings, committees of inquiry, interviews and newspaper reports, came to the daylight, as ex agents of the underground unit of the Pentagongeheimdienstes dia., "Able Danger", publicly over apron knowledge to 11.9. stated. The fact that the reporting was completely suppressed and hushed up over this affair in Germany, creates an explosive potential: everyone, which is occupied superficially with the available official, legal and respectable reports, can come only to the conclusion that at least parts of the German secret services and police authorities must have been informed in the apron about the notice plans 11 September. The history of the special-purpose force "Able Danger" of the US military secret service dia. fills volumes and its own Blog: abledangerblog.com . For this a practical, free dictionary is recommended to the downloaden: (12). In edited version (10): "Able Danger" had identified Mohammed Atta at least 13 times before 11-September, together with 40 to other "aluminium-Qaida"-members and terrorists. In the middle of August 2005 explained US Army Colonel Anthony Shaffer, an ex agent, publicly that the Able Danger team Atta and three would have already identified other 9/11-Attentaeter in the year 2000, but prevented by military lawyers would be to pass on the information to the FBI. One week stated Captain Scott J. Phillpott, a coworker of the command for special operations in the pentagon, likewise that "Atta of Able Danger was identified, in January February 2000".At the 18.August 2005 the pentagon did not start an investigation, with the result, it would give proofs for Col. Shaffers statements.Nothing the defiance addition speakers pentagon two weeks later, internal "investigations" would have resulted in that "three further persons could remind of a Briefing which the leaders of the 9/11-Attentaeter identified themselves one year before the notices took place". The same speakers explained in addition, "that the documents and elekronischen data which of Able Danger were put on, were destroyed due to the data protection regulations concerning the use of personal data of US citizens by the military." Subsequently, the pentagon several military members before the congress forbade stating to the Able Danger program.The ex-Able Danger agent J.D.Smith again gave to minutes, he could have acquired a photo Atta with Arab middlemen in the area Los Angeles. The photo was one of approximately 40 by aluminium-Qaida members, to who it would have transferred personally in a briefcase Pentagon coworkers, more than one year before the notices to 11.9.2001. As said, he made this statement not somewhere - but before the Streikraefteausschuss of congress of US at the 16.Februar 2006. In rolling the investigation of the incidents had brought Able Danger "the republican delegate Curt Weldon, which gathered the signature of 247 colleagues from the congress in self-sacrificing work around the dia. unit to", to let finite state in order to force the pentagon to it the agents. To the question, whether the briefcase would have really contained Atta's photo, it answered Smith: "I am absolutely safe." A copy of Attas photo would have hung on the wall of its office. "I saw it each day."Curt Weldon and Dan Burton, both congressional representatives, explained publicly, they would briefly have handed a briefcase with collected information of the Able hiring ER unit about aluminium-Qaida to the national security advisor over at that time steven Hadley after the notices on 11-September from the time before 11.9.. Later the white house confirmed such a briefcase over a speaker that security advisor remembered ", in this time period to have seen", but that it cannot remember any longer, whether this had been in a meeting. The briefcase was explained for disappeared. The question, why the 9/11 committee of inquiry never took up the statements of the dia. agents and itself refused also only treating this topic was so far not clarified. Criticism came to it from all sides, also from the chairman of the law committee, Arlen Specter, but without result (9)(10). We remember: the congress members of the 9/11 committee of inquiry had been inaugurated at this time again long into the Swift account monitoring by US secret services... (11)Democracy and courage… two of each other elementarily are dependent and itself mutually causing factors. One does not go without the other one. Facts cannot away-talk, in the long term never hush up crimes. The attempt to overlay the whole war plot around 11.9. by still more war will fail. Too many things are differently than in former times, too many humans now finally entrance to information and too many humans to stand with the back at the wall and could back-soft no longer.In order to say it with Abraham Lincoln:"You CAN fool all the people some OF the time, and some OF the people all the time, but you CAN emergency fool all the people all the time." The US Imperium, which enormous, apparently unbesiegbare Goliath of our time and world, he varies, and with him capitalism. Humans in the USA face the whole process just as unlocked as all different also, because which they have from superrealms, military, Dekadenz, corruption and Chancenlosigkeit? A few Schwaetzer of US democrats, they have that of it.Also comes us nevertheless somehow admits forwards, or?Sources:
01. tagesschau.de
05. own report
09. hillnews.com
02. own report
06. wikipedia.org
10. wikipedia.org
03. wikipedia.org
07. netzeitung.de
11. own report
04. washingtonpost.com
08. abledangerblog.com
12. download tipp.de
© 0815-Info, 19.10.2006

GERMAN ORIGINAL TEXT

Der Fall Zammar

Der gefährliche Häftling aus Damaskus ist eine politische Zeitbombe für das Establishment

von Daniel Neun


Syrien. Durch einen Zufall tauchte eine gefühlte Schlüsselfigur der Attentate vom 11. September wieder aus der Versenkung auf: der deutsche Staatsbürger Mohammed Haydar Zammar nannte vor einem syrischen Staatssicherheitsgericht seinen Namen und gab an, er stamme aus Deutschland, so Medienberichte. Dies habe zufällig ein anwesender EU-Beamter mitgehört, der routinemäßig derartige Prozesse mitverfolge. Zammar drohe wegen Mitgliedschaft in der verbotenen Muslimbruderschaft die Todesstrafe(1).
Nicht nur die Tatsache, daß ein Deutscher still und heimlich, irgendwo in Gefängnissen des syrischen MAD-Partnerdienstes, also des Militärgeheimdienstes, gefangen, gefoltert und nun zum Tode verurteilt werden soll, macht die Sache so brisant - Zammar ist der lebende Beweis und Zeuge der Fakten um die "El Kaida"-Zelle in der Hamburger Marienstraße und der ganzen "Islamisten-Terroristen-Teppichmesser-Boeing-Boing-ins-World-Trade-Center"- Entführungs-Nummer überhaupt.
Was eine Vielzahl von gutbürgerlichen Medien bereits berichteten, was aber sofort nach Erscheinen unter die selbstauferlegte Hypnose-Beruhigungsformel der deutschen Öffentlichkeit namens "Verschwörungstheorie" fiel, ist der eigentliche Kern des juristischen und politischen Sprengsatzes, der ohne Zweifel irgendwann hochgehen wird:
Mohammed Haydar Zammar war seit den 90ern unter Beobachtung der deutschen und US-amerikanischen Geheimdienste und mit ihm die gesamte "Terrorzelle" von Mohammed Atta (2). D.h., die Attentate vom 11.9. wurden offensichtlich auch von deutschen Sicherheitsbehörden zumindest nicht verhindert, obwohl dies möglich gewesen wäre.
BKA, Syrien, US-Geheimdienste und das Foltergefängnis
Laut Spiegel Online vom 04. März 2006 wurde Mohammed Haydar Zammar nach einem direkten Hinweis des BKA an das FBI vom 26. November 2001, wo Aufenthaltsort und Flugdaten Zammars übermittelt wurden, in Marokko durch örtliche Behörden unter US-Beteiligung festgesetzt. Zammar wurde anschließend in das berüchtigte Foltergefängnis Far`Falastin des syrischen Militärgeheimdienstes in Damaskus gebracht, wo er offensichtlich über Jahre schwer gefoltert wurde. Am 14. Dezember 2005 wurde offiziell bestätigt, daß auch BKA-Beamte Zammar dort verhörten (3).
Bereits am 31. Januar 2003 berichtete die Washington Post von einem Deutschen, der im in Far´Falastins Kellern gefangen gehalten wurde (4). Die Zustände dort werden wie folgt beschrieben: ein Käfig, rattenverseucht, ohne Licht, 1x1 Meter lang und breit und weniger als zwei Meter hoch. Die Gefangenen würden nur herausgeholt ,um verhört oder gefoltert zu werden. Der Deutsche wäre von insgesamt fünf Mitgefangenen eindeutig identifiziert worden ... es sei Mohammed Haydar Zammar gewesen.
"Es ist ein schrecklicher Platz", so der damals 38-jährige Marokkaner Driss bin Lakoul 2003 zur Washington Post. Die Schreie Gefolterter wären ständig hörbar, er sei froh darüber, nur mit Elektrokabeln auf die Fußsohlen geschlagen worden zu sein. Noch einmal zur Erinnerung: das BKA ist eine Polizeibehörde und unterliegt richterlicher Kontrolle. Und die richterliche Kontrolle unterliegt der Schutzmacht der Schwächeren - dem Grundgesetz.
Niemand steht über dem Grundgesetz. Das BKA hat zugegeben, Zammar in Far´Falastin ´verhört zu haben. Warum sind diese "Beamten" nicht sofort verhaftet worden? Warum ließen die deutschen Behörden Zammar trotz Verhören nach den Attentaten vom 11. September am 27. Oktober 2001 ausreisen, wie es ebenfalls die Washington Post vom 31. Januar 2003 berichtet?
Der syrische Geschäftsmann und die "Terrorzelle"
Wir berichteten schon vor einiger Zeit (s. "Der Psychokrieg I+II (5)(2)) über Versuche, eine Verbindung zwischen der Kofferbomben-Intrige, der "El Kaida"-Terrorzelle und angeblichen Flugzeugattentaten in London mit Energydrinks zu konstruieren.
Immer wieder im Mittelpunkt des Geschehens: der ex-Bundeswehrsoldat Said Bahaji. Er war seit dem 1. November 1998 Bewohner der berüchtigten Hamburger Marienstraße, wie Mohammed Atta und Ramzi Binalshibh (6). Trotzdem behauptete der "Verfassungsschutz" (also der Inlandsgeheimdienst), er hätte nie von Verbindungen zwischen Atta und Bahaji gehört. Auch wedelten die Agenten mit dem Zeigefinger, als es um eine weitere ominöse Figur der sogannten "El Kaida" und der Terrorzelle in der Marienstraße ging: den mysteriösen syrischen Geschäftsmann Mamoun Darkazanli.
Laut Zeitungsberichten besaß dieser eine Vollmacht über das Konto des mutmaßlichen Finanzchefs Bin Ladens Mamdouh Mahmud Salim besaß, über das die Flugstunden der Attentäter bezahlt wurden. Die Bundesanwaltschaft (BAW) hatte zwei Tage nach den Attentaten in New York und Washington ein Konto von Darkazanli bei der Hamburger Sparkasse (HASPA) sperren lassen, so ein Bericht des Hamburger Abendblattes. Der Name Darkazanli war außerdem auf einer Liste mit 27 Organisationen aufgetaucht, deren Konten in den USA wegen Terrorverdachts gesperrt worden waren. Trotzdem dementierte die BAW alle Vorwürfe gegen Darkazanli und ließ ihn laufen (7).
Die Spezialeinheit "Able Danger" des US-Militärgeheimdienstes DIA
Laut Erkenntnissen, die im Zuge der "Able Danger"-Affäre in den USA ans Licht der Öffentlichkeit kamen, hatte der 9/11-Verschwörer und ex-Bundeswehrsoldat Said Bahaji sehr wohl Kontakt mit dem syrischen Geschäftsmann Darkazanli, und nicht nur das: Bahaji gelangte angeblich gerade durch den Kontakt zu Darkazanli 1998 in das Visier der deutschen Agenten, welche dann durch die "Observation" Bahajis wertvolle Erkenntnisse über Attas Gruppe bekam (8). Bahaji, der trotz eindeutiger Hinweise an die deutschen Behörden und einschlägiger Passvermerke nach dem 11.9. aus Deutschland ausreisen durfte, ist übrigens bis auf den heutigen Tag verschwunden.
Die Quellen dieser Nachrichten, Informationen aus Dutzenden von Kongreß-Anhörungen, Untersuchungsausschüssen, Interviews und Zeitungsberichten, kamen ans Tageslicht, als ex-Agenten der Untergrundeinheit des Pentagongeheimdienstes DIA, "Able Danger", öffentlich über Vorfelderkenntnisse zum 11.9. aussagten. Die Tatsache, daß die Berichterstattung über diese Affäre in Deutschland komplett unterdrückt und totgeschwiegen wurde, schafft ein explosives Potential: jeder, der sich oberflächlich mit den vorliegenden offiziellen, legalen und seriösen Berichten beschäftigt, kann nur zu dem Schluss kommen, daß zumindest Teile der deutschen Geheimdienste und Polizeibehörden im Vorfeld über die Anschlagspläne des 11. September informiert gewesen sein müssen.
Die Geschichte der Spezialeinheit "Able Danger" des US-Militärgeheimdienstes DIA füllt Bände und seinen eigenen Blog: abledangerblog.com . Hierfür sei ein praktisches, kostenloses Wörterbuch zum downloaden empfohlen: (12). In Kurzfassung (10): "Able Danger" hatte Mohammed Atta mindestens 13 Mal vor dem 11.September identifiziert, zusammen mit 40 anderen "Al-Qaida"-Mitgliedern und Terroristen.
Mitte August 2005 erklärte US Army Colonel Anthony Shaffer, ein ex-Agent, öffentlich, daß das Able Danger Team Atta und drei andere 9/11-Attentäter bereits im Jahr 2000 identifiziert hätten, aber von Militäranwälten daran gehindert worden wären, die Informationen an das FBI weiterzugeben. Eine Woche sagte Captain Scott J. Phillpott, ein Mitarbeiter des Kommandos für Spezialoperationen im Pentagon, ebenfalls aus, daß "Atta von Able Danger identifiziert wurde, im Januar-Februar 2000".
Am 18.August 2005 startete das Pentagon eine Untersuchung, mit dem Ergebnis, es gäbe keine Beweise für Col. Shaffers Behauptungen.
Nichtsdestotrotz gaben Sprecher des Pentagon zwei Wochen später zu, interne "Nachforschungen" hätten ergeben, daß "drei weitere Personen sich an ein Briefing erinnern könnten welches die Anführer der 9/11-Attentäter identifizierte ein Jahr bevor die Anschläge stattfanden". Dieselben Sprecher erklärten außerdem, "daß die Dokumente und elekronischen Daten welche von Able Danger angelegt wurden, zerstört worden sind aufgrund der Datenschutzbestimmungen bezüglich der Verwendung von persönlichen Daten von US-Bürgern durch das Militär." Anschließend verbot das Pentagon mehreren Militärangehörigen vor dem Kongreß zum Able Danger Programm auszusagen.
Der ex-Able Danger Agent J.D.Smith wiederum gab zu Protokoll, er hätte ein Foto Atta bei arabischen Zwischenhändlern im Raum Los Angeles erwerben können. Das Foto sei eins von ungefähr 40 von Al-Qaida Mitgliedern gewesen, welche er persönlich in einer Mappe Pentagon-Mitarbeitern übergeben hätte, mehr als ein Jahr vor den Anschlägen am 11.9.2001. Wie gesagt, diese Aussage machte er nicht irgendwo - sondern vor dem Streikräfteausschuß des US-Kongresses am 16.Februar 2006. Ins Rollen gebracht hatte die Untersuchung der Vorfälle um die DIA-Einheit "Able Danger" der republikanische Abgeordnete Curt Weldon, der in aufopferungsvoller Arbeit die Unterschrift von 247 Kollegen aus dem Kongreß zusammentrug, um das Pentagon dazu zu zwingen die Agenten endlich aussagen zu lassen. Auf die Frage, ob die Mappe wirklich Atta´s Foto enthalten hätte, antwortete Smith: "Ich bin absolut sicher." Eine Kopie von Attas Foto hätte an der Wand seines Büros gehangen. "Ich sah es jeden Tag."
Curt Weldon und Dan Burton, beide Kongreßabgeordnete, erklärten öffentlich, sie hätten kurz nach den Anschlägen am 11.September dem damaligen Nationalen Sicherheitsberater Steven Hadley eine Mappe mit gesammelten Informationen der Able Danger-Einheit über Al-Qaida aus der Zeit vor dem 11.9. übergeben. Später bestätigte das Weiße Haus über einen Sprecher, daß Sicherheitsberater sich "zwar erinnert hat, eine solche Mappe in dieser Zeitperiode gesehen zu haben", aber daß er sich nicht mehr erinnern könne, ob dies in einem Meeting gewesen sei. Die Mappe wurde für verschwunden erklärt.
Die Frage, warum der 9/11 Untersuchungsausschuß nie die Aussagen der DIA-Agenten aufnahm und sich weigerte, dieses Thema auch nur zu behandeln, wurde bisher nicht geklärt. Kritik kam dazu zwar von allen Seiten, auch vom Vorsitzenden des Justizausschusses, Arlen Specter, aber ohne Ergebnis (9)(10). Wir erinnern uns: die Kongreßmitglieder des 9/11 Untersuchungsausschusses waren zu diesem Zeitpunkt wiederum längst in die SWIFT-Kontenüberwachung durch US-Geheimdienste eingeweiht worden...(11)
Demokratie und Mut
… sind zwei von einander elementar abhängige und sich gegenseitig bedingende Faktoren. Das Eine geht nicht ohne das Andere. Fakten können nicht weggeredet, Verbrechen auf Dauer nie vertuscht werden. Der Versuch, die ganze Kriegsintrige um den 11.9. durch noch mehr Krieg zu überlagern, wird scheitern. Zu viele Dinge sind anders als früher, zu viele Menschen haben jetzt endlich Zugang zu Informationen und zu viele Menschen stehen mit dem Rücken an der Wand und können nicht mehr zurückweichen.
Um es mit Abraham Lincoln zu sagen:"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Das US-Imperium, der riesige, scheinbar unbesiegbare Goliath unserer Zeit und Welt, er schwankt, und mit ihm der Kapitalismus. Die Menschen in den USA stehen dem ganzen Prozeß ähnlich aufgeschlossen gegenüber wie alle Anderen auch, denn was haben sie von Superreichen, Militär, Dekadenz, Korruption und Chancenlosigkeit? Ein paar Schwätzer von US-Demokraten, das haben sie davon.
Auch das kommt uns doch irgendwie bekannt vor, oder?

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posted by u2r2h at 4:13 PM 0 comments