Naomi Klein: Break it, pay for it

Once again, Naomi Klein, right on target:

Hunger in Iraq is not merely the humanitarian fallout of a war--it is the direct result of the US decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a country that was already sickened and weakened by twelve years of sanctions. Paul Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis, and his primary accomplishment--for which he was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom--was to oversee a "reconstruction" process that systematically stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to foreign firms, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 67 percent. And the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of industrialized countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80 percent, contingent on Iraq's future governments adhering to a strict International Monetary Fund austerity program. According to early drafts, that program includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatization), a plan that Iraq's Ministry of Industry predicts will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms," the IMF also wants to eliminate the program that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food--the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organization, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a member--provided it adopts certain "reforms."


So let's be absolutely clear: The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible. This is what famed Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing before his 1977 assassination by the military junta, described as "planned misery." And the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more misery it will plan.


The Nation
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050110&s=klein

lookout by Naomi Klein
You Break It, You Pay For It

[from the January 10, 2005 issue]

So it turns out Pottery Barn doesn't even have a rule that says, "You break it, you own it." According to a company spokesperson, "in the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it's written off as a loss." Yet the nonexistent policy of a store selling $80 corkscrews continues to wield more influence in the United States than the Geneva Conventions and the US Army's Law of Land Warfare combined. As Bob Woodward has noted, Colin Powell invoked "the Pottery Barn rule" before the invasion, while John Kerry pledged his allegiance to it during the first presidential debate. And the imaginary rule is still the favored blunt instrument with which to whack anyone who dares to suggest that the time has come to withdraw troops from Iraq: Sure the war is a disaster, the argument goes, but we can't stop now--you break it, you own it.

Though not invoking the chain store by name, Nicholas Kristof laid out this argument in a recent New York Times column. "Our mistaken invasion has left millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be inhumane to abandon them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some hope that Iraqis will come to enjoy security and better lives, but if we pull out we will be condemning Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children over the next decade."

Let's start with the idea that the United States is helping to provide security. On the contrary, the presence of US troops is provoking violence on a daily basis. The truth is that as long as the troops remain, the country's entire security apparatus--occupation forces as well as Iraqi soldiers and police officers--will be exclusively dedicated to fending off resistance attacks, leaving a security vacuum when it comes to protecting regular Iraqis. If the troops pulled out, Iraqis would still face insecurity, but they would be able to devote their local security resources to regaining control over their cities and neighborhoods.

As for preventing "anarchy," the US plan to bring elections to Iraq seems designed to spark a civil war--the civil war needed to justify an ongoing presence for US troops no matter who wins the elections. It was always clear that the Shiite majority, which has been calling for immediate elections for more than a year, was never going to accept any delay in the election timetable. And it was equally clear that by destroying Falluja in the name of preparing the city for elections, much of the Sunni leadership would be forced to call for an election boycott.

When Kristof asserts that US forces should stay in Iraq to save "hundreds of thousands of children" from starvation, it's hard to imagine what he has in mind. Hunger in Iraq is not merely the humanitarian fallout of a war--it is the direct result of the US decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a country that was already sickened and weakened by twelve years of sanctions. Paul Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis, and his primary accomplishment--for which he was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom--was to oversee a "reconstruction" process that systematically stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to foreign firms, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 67 percent. And the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of industrialized countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80 percent, contingent on Iraq's future governments adhering to a strict International Monetary Fund austerity program. According to early drafts, that program includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatization), a plan that Iraq's Ministry of Industry predicts will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms," the IMF also wants to eliminate the program that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food--the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organization, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a member--provided it adopts certain "reforms."

So let's be absolutely clear: The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible. This is what famed Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing before his 1977 assassination by the military junta, described as "planned misery." And the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more misery it will plan.

But if staying in Iraq is not the solution, neither are easy bumper-sticker calls to pull the troops out and spend the money on schools and hospitals at home. Yes, the troops must leave, but that can be only one plank of a credible and moral antiwar platform. What of the schools and hospitals in Iraq--the ones that were supposed to be fixed by Bechtel but never were? Too often, antiwar forces have shied away from speaking about what Americans owe Iraq. Rarely is the word "compensation" spoken, let alone the more loaded "reparations."

Antiwar forces have also failed to offer concrete support for the political demands coming out of Iraq. For instance, when the Iraqi National Assembly forcefully condemned the Paris Club deal for forcing the Iraqi people to pay Saddam's "odious" debts and robbing them of their economic sovereignty, the antiwar movement was virtually silent, save the dogged but undersupported Jubilee Iraq. And while US soldiers aren't protecting Iraqis from starvation, the food rations certainly are--so why isn't safeguarding this desperately needed program one of our central demands?

The failure to develop a credible platform beyond "troops out" may be one reason the antiwar movement remains stalled, even as opposition to the war deepens. Because the Pottery Barn rulers do have a point: Breaking a country should have consequences for the breakers. Owning the broken country should not be one of them, but how about paying for the repairs?

NYT: Election Standards Unlikely

NYT: Election standards unlikely

Once again, in order to read the news, one has to read the Times editorials, as if the editors were loath to report in the news pages on news not fit to print. One wonders how they got the information below. Did they send a reporter to report exclusively to the editorial board? Do they simply monitor the news wires? In the one or two news articles they printed on the Ohio vote count, they hastened to assure us, based on no evidence, merely on statements made by Republican and Democratic party operatives, that any discrepancies would not come close to giving the state and the election to Kerry. This is how what is left to our democracy is tossed away. As the editorial below implicitly acknowledges, there is no political force willing or capable of changing things for the 2006 and 2008 elections. --RB



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/opinion/27mon1.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
Editorial
New York Times
December 27, 2004
MAKING VOTES COUNT
Setting Standards for Fair Elections


The much-delayed work of setting federal standards for electronic voting machines is speeding up, and there is reason for concern. Voting machine companies and their supporters have been given a large say in the process, while advocates for voters, including those who insist on the use of voter-verified paper receipts, have been pushed to the margins. Election officials and machine makers may be betting that after the presidential election, ordinary Americans have lost interest in the mechanics of the ballot. But Americans do care, and it is unlikely that they will be satisfied by a process in which special interests dominate, or by a result that does not ensure vote totals that can be trusted.

The No. 1 goal of the new standards should be ensuring that the machines will not, by accident or design, produce false vote totals. It is increasingly clear that voters want electronic, A.T.M.-type voting machines that produce verifiable paper records, or other systems like optical scan machines, where votes are cast on paper as a check on the reliability of machines. California, Ohio and other states require paper trails by law, and New York appears poised to join them.

The Election Assistance Commission, a federal body set up after the 2000 election mess, has created a group called the Technical Guidelines Development Committee to propose federal electronic voting standards to Congress this spring. This committee includes outspoken supporters of electronic voting without paper trails, including Britain Williams, a retired Kennesaw State University professor who has worked closely with Georgia on its controversial adoption of Diebold voting machines. But disappointingly, the commission did not include any of the many respected computer scientists - such as Prof. Aviel Rubin of Johns Hopkins, Prof. David Dill of Stanford or Dr. Rebecca Mercuri - who have been warning about the unreliability of electronic voting in its current form.

The election commission is expected to rely heavily on standards being developed by a nonprofit association of engineers, computer scientists and other professionals with the unfortunate acronym of I.E.E.E., which develops technical standards for such things as wireless communications. But the voting machine industry plays a disconcertingly large role in this organization. The chairman of the working group preparing the standards for voting machines is a top executive of Election Systems and Software, a large and controversial voting machine maker. The head of the committee that oversees the working group has a seat on the election commission's voting machines standards committee. He is a consultant who has been hired in the past by companies in the elections field. Because of the insular nature of the engineering panel's meetings, ordinary voters - who have an important stake - have had little chance to participate. Over the objections of some members of the working group, the current draft of the election-machine standards merely makes voter-verified paper trails optional. The draft's scope is also too narrow: it fails to address many ways in which vote totals could be rigged.

The Election Assistance Commission has a chance to lead the nation to a new generation of technology that voters can trust. But if it fails, there are other routes. California has developed its own state standards for machines with paper trails, and other states could do likewise. And some of the nation's leading election reform advocates, election officials and voting machine makers are forming a new group, called Voting System Performance Rating, that hopes to develop standards in a more inclusive way. Whoever sets the standards, the process and the result need to give voters complete confidence that their votes will be accurately counted.

NYT: Hubble in peril

More evidence of the Bush administration's anti-science agenda. They've reduced the Science budget and will do what they can to allow Hubble to die. They are far from comfortable with a device that proves that the universe is more than 13 billion years old. Their plan to put a man on Mars is a clever maneuver to divert funds from real science. --RB


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/opinion/12sun1.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
December 12, 2004
EDITORIAL
A Blow to NASA's Hubble Rescue

The space agency's plan to rescue its most important scientific instrument, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a robotic servicing mission looks increasingly like a bad bet. A panel of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences concluded last week that there was only a remote chance a robotic mission could be mounted quickly enough to succeed and some danger that it might damage the instrument. Instead, the panel said that NASA should send astronauts up on a shuttle flight to service and rescue this incredibly valuable telescope before its gyroscopes and batteries begin to fail a few years from now.

The academy's unusually blunt assessment and a similar judgment by the Aerospace Corporation provide the strongest evidence yet that NASA ought to reconsider its previous opposition to a shuttle rescue flight. The paramount goal ought to be preserving the Hubble by any means necessary, even if that requires diverting the shuttle from other tasks and slowing the president's grandiose plans to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars in future years. If the space agency balks, Congress will need to insist that NASA make the Hubble its highest near-term priority and use the shuttle if necessary.

There is no longer any doubt that the Hubble is worth saving. Although NASA officials have sometimes denigrated the Hubble as a waning asset whose best years are behind it, the academy panel concluded that Hubble's future discoveries would be every bit as spectacular as its past successes. That is a remarkable statement to make about any mature scientific instrument.

Hubble has observed the universe as it existed 12 billion years ago, helped establish the size and age of the universe and discovered massive black holes at the center of many galaxies, among a host of findings that have reshaped our understanding of cosmology.

If its batteries and gyroscopes are replaced and two new instruments placed aboard by a servicing mission, the rejuvenated Hubble is expected to help find 1,000 new planets in the Milky Way galaxy; trace the formation of the first stars and black holes; and elucidate the nature of the mysterious dark energy that permeates the universe, among myriad possibilities. Hubble's endless productivity is the fruit of periodic servicing missions that not only replace depleted batteries and gyroscopes but also upgrade the observational instruments to take advantage of technological advances.

Hubble has already been serviced four times by shuttle astronauts, and a fifth flight was scheduled when the loss of the shuttle Columbia last year forced NASA to ground the three remaining shuttles for safety modifications. All future flights will be dedicated to finishing the half-built space station now orbiting uselessly overhead. Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, has scrubbed the Hubble mission as too risky to undertake.

That excuse has now been exposed as a sham. The academy panel judged a shuttle flight to the Hubble only marginally more risky than a flight to the space station (and therefore far less risky than the combined 25 to 30 shuttle flights needed to complete the station). The tremendous scientific benefits to be gained from the Hubble are well worth the very small differential risk of a servicing flight, in the panel's judgment. Many astronauts clearly agree and are eager to fly to the Hubble. It is probably the most important contribution they could make to the advance of knowledge.

The academy favored an astronaut mission over robotics because the astronauts are far more likely to succeed. They have done the job well in the past and have the ability to cope with unexpected problems that might frustrate a robot. NASA has never carried out such a complex robotic repair and, based on its past history, is unlikely to pull this one off before Hubble conks out.

As of now NASA is pursuing a robotics program that it still deems highly promising and doing nothing to pursue an astronaut mission. The real reason the agency prefers robotics is that the same technologies might prove useful in the president's long-range plan to explore the Moon and Mars, whereas diverting a shuttle to the Hubble would disrupt NASA's planned high-speed dash to complete the station and retire the costly shuttles to free up money for the president's exploration program.

The agency faces two important design reviews for its robotics program next year. Unless those show astonishing progress, NASA should get cracking on an astronaut flight to the Hubble. The great danger is that NASA will convince itself and Congress that robotics will work, and then down the line confess failure and let a spectacularly successful telescope die from neglect.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Kerry betrays democracy -- three views

December 2, 2004


The Benfrank.net article below is a good example of one of the leading conspiracy theories regarding Kerry's silence in the face of massive evidence of election fraud. Benfrank.net seems to believe that a Mafia operation controls both candidates. The conspiracy is given wings by the happenstance that both Kerry and Bush were members of Skull and Bones at Yale.

The Benfrank article is important, nevertheless, because of its review of the current situation and the evidence it provides of election fraud in Ohio and what a genuine Kerry recount effort would have looked like and might have uncovered.

I still like my theory, wonderfully outlined by Michael Thomas, that Kerry, like several other Democrats before him, was not up to the demands of the office and preferred not to be president. (See
M. Thomas: Kerry can't handle presidency: why such a lame campaign?
http://dysbushtopia.blogspot.com/)

Here's Greg Palast for a more traditional view of why Kerry and the Party aren't fighting for a recount.

Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php


In a similar article for In These Times, Palast goes into more detail.

But Kerry waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry’s lawyers would first have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a “Kate Harris” by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry’s team also would have to litigate each rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote as Blackwell challenged each. Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the willpower of the Ohio Republican machine.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/1686/


One problem with Palast's view is that arguably there would be little downside if Kerry and the Democrats had chosen to fight. Quite the contrary, it would have been the only way to continue the struggle for the remainder of the democracy that still exists in our country. It is clear now and will be clearer in hindsight that Kerry should not have conceded until all the votes had been counted. Even a losing struggle would have shed much needed light on the process and might have done a great deal to prevent its reoccurrence in 2006 and 2008.

--Ronald Bleier

PS: It's still not too late to contact Kerry through his brother, Cameron Kerry ckerry@mintz.com, and through the DNC vri@dnc.org.


http://www.benfrank.net/nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=272

Kerry Threw the Election
by BENFRANK.NET

(Editor's Note: Kerry coulda been a contender, but his Skull and Bones brothers told him to throw the election. And so Ben Frank learns how the world works...)

Kerry's silence indicates complicity with vote fraud.

Go to JohnKerry.com and you will find absolutely nothing about the mounting evidence of vote fraud.

Why? There is no mention of the official voting receipts found in the garbage, or about the vote suppression in Ohio, or about the GAO starting an investigation into the 57,000 reported cased of voting ’irregularities’ nationwide. 13 Members of Congress have asked for an investigation into the voting problems, heaven forbid JohnKerry.com mention that.

Why is it that VoteNader.com and VoteCobb.org both address the voting problems right on the front page, but the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Edwards won’t address the issue at all?

It seems like Kerry and Edwards didn’t really want to win, almost like they’re ready for a vacation. They’re telling us, get over it, we lost, it’s time to move on and unite behind our leader? What the bleep is that all about? I thought Kerry was our candidate because Bush was so bad we had to get rid of shrubbie.

Then after this election where all of the computer ’glitches’ favored bush, kerry just tucks tail and hides? Thousands of Americans were turned away from the polls thanks to Republican dirty tricks, so kerry gives up and tells us to get behind Bush? seettuuuup.

We’ve wasted billions of dollars and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives- now we’re stuck in a war without end and the hatred of America at an all time high... and our guy, Mr. Anybody But Bush, is silent about vote fraud and suppression that clearly cost him the election. Doesn’t that seem a little bit fishy?

Kerry is joined in silence by Edwards, Dean, Clinton, Gore and the official Democratic Party. They all remain silent in the face of undeniable evidence of vote fraud. And it’s not just the voting machines without a paper trail, there are hundreds of sworn statements delivered by Ohio residents detailing various Republican tricks to prevent democrats from voting.

Why are Nader and Cobb raising money for recounts while Kerry refuses to pay for any of them? Is Kerry really fighting for the people? If he is, why does he have $51 million left over from his campaign? How can anyone think that not spending $50 million was part of a successful plan to win? Why did Kerry do that?

If you’d been reading news on the net before the election, you’d have known that some people were claiming Kerry was throwing the election all the way.

Bush and Kerry are distant cousins, and both members of the ’frat’ Skull and Bones at Yale. (1) Think, is it just an amazing coincidence that the two main candidates were related, multi-millionaire boners? Is it possible for you to consider that, perhaps there really is an elite group of families running the country? Some call it the New World Order, it’s like the Mafia x 1000, without the accents.

Understandably most Americans are reluctant to think that organized crime has taken over our government, that both candidates were puppets for evil behind the scenes masters. But folks, what if its true? Isn’t it worth looking at? It’s easier for people to tell themselves that Bush really won, stupid people voted for him and now we’re stuck with four more years of war.

his is easier because they can continue about their life as usual- recognizing that our gov’t is corrupt might require them to change their daily lives. It’s so much easier to say, "Oh well, too bad for those Iraqis and Iranians that will die, at least I still have my life as usual." Apathy- that’s what is killing our country.

To acknowledge that the mafia has taken over is a scary concept, nonetheless, i ask you to see if the hat fits. In my opinion, this was a staged election all the way, with the express purpose of re-installing Bush to create the illusion of warmongering America, justifying more wars, more terror threats and more spying on Americans- Big Brother has arrived. Am I a ’conspiracy nut’? Think for yourself, which doesn’t mean believe everything I say, but it means do not discredit it just because the mainstream media does. Are these thoughts really outlandish conspiracy, or just basic logic?

Why did the Democrats choose a pro-war candidate. If we really had to beat Bush, wouldn’t an anti-war candidate been the clear difference that kerry couldn’t create.

By election day, people were saying, "well their policies are about the same, and i like bush better, he’s funny to listen to." Why weren’t we allowed a choice between pro-war and anti-war? Was kerry really the choice of the people, or was he a puppet installed against our will- by the corporate media.

Kerry’s campaign sucked. Bush lied, flat out lied, and we have it on tape! All kerry needed to do was present these lies to the public and the idiot would be exposed, but kerry didn’t. He "never used the harshest word" to describe bush’s lies. Why?

I’m sorry but I just can’t get over this- Kerry finished this election campaign with $50 million in the bank. Why? He didn’t want to win is the only logical explanation. Several days after the story broke, they came out with damage control- Kerry has only $15 million left, he gave the rest to the DNC. Think the numbers transposed is mere coincidence, or intentional misinformation?

Even with the $15 million, kerry hasn’t offered to help pay for any of the recounts, BBVs Florida investigation or even the Volusia County Lawsuit. (2)

Exit Polls are the canary in the mine shaft, they’ve exposed vote fraud in two other nations this year, but in America the media and Kerry/Edwards say the exit polls were wrong- move on, get over it.

From Exit Polls to Protect the Vote
- after the exit polls and results didn’t match in Georgia (Russia), opposition supporters stormed the parliament and the president was forced to resign.

After Exit Polls clashed with final results in the Ukraine Yushchenko stood up and demanded a fair vote. Why didn’t Kerry? This led to hundreds of thousands braving sub-zero temperatures to protest the unelected government.

The Exit Polls were off here, only in the Key swing states, and always in favor of Bush, what an amazing coincidence... 250 million to 1 odds according to Steven Freeman, PhD. Why hasn’t kerry mentioned this, or at least posted a link on his website.... because he doesn’t want to look bad? I’d say he looks pretty f***in bad right now.

If Kerry had stood up and addressed these vote fraud issues, the media would not have been able to completely blackout the story as they have. Only Keith Olbermann has mentioned it on MSNBC, so perhaps a few million americans have seen it on tv, and a few million more on the internet.... but the vast majority continues to live in the ’bush won’ reality. Kerry’s silence is enabling this media blackout.

Are these the actions of a real candidate that really wanted to save America from the warmongers?

"But to find a resolution of the conflict does not mean accepting falsified elections. We will never agree to that." Nice eh, too bad that came from Ukranian Presidential Challenger Viktor

Yushchenko. Why didn’t our candidate say that?

And perhaps more importantly, does Bush agree with these words from the Ukranian incumbent, "I need no fictitious victory, a result which could lead to violence and victims. No position of authority, no matter how important, is worth a single human life."

What can you do about it? Boycott entertainment- turn off the tv and NPR. Listen to inspiring music and get fired up. Listen to that MLK speech everyday and feel his passion.

Then, be your own media- make phone calls, write emails, print flyers or even FreewayBlog. Do something, anything to pass this information on, the election was stolen, and Kerry is complicit. Trust me, most people are excited to hear that there is hope to overthrow the shrubbie- get out there and give people hope!

Or is it easier to just forget all this and turn the tv back on, i’m sure some great sitcoms or reality shows are on to distract you, to keep you silent, stuck inside your own home.

"There comes a time when silence is betrayal" - Martin Luther King Jr.

1. How weird is Skull and Bones? When they tried to admit women in the 90’s, a group of bonesman including William F. Buckley sued to keep the women out, claiming it would lead to date rape.

2. BlackBoxVoting’s Bev Harris found the smoking gun, proof of fraud and the Kerry camp does not care. According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections on November 17, 2004, the GEMS computer is not networked, and is "stand alone." The furnished computer logs show evidence of at least two attempts to remotely access the GEMS central tabulator, which is claimed to be secure. A computer screen shot printout on November 17, 2004 (found in the trash) shows that the GEMS computer at that time had two networked hard drives.

I showed the logs to CNN cameramen yesterday, along with 59 orange-tagged poll tapes that were missing signatures, zero tapes, sometimes missing results altogether! No interest in getting a shot of that smoking gun at all.

We intereviewed poll workers. On camera. Showed them the poll tapes we were given by Volusia County. To a person, they said, with great concern, "That is NOT what we submitted to the county."
One remembered the results on his poll tape. What he remembered, before ever seeing the results tape or hearing what was on our copy, was not the same. His memory for a precinct with a tad over 400 voters had 60 more votes for Kerry. Of course, that’s not legally binding, since he hadn’t written it down.

And don’t forget that in Volusia, poll workers were told to bring their memory cards and poll tapes off to ’drop offs’ or ’depots’, and it was there that the modem-ing occurred. We have no information whatsoever on who was in those depots, or what they were doing, or what equipment was there.

Meahwhile a completely irresponsible Kerry Campaign holds on to a $52 million litigation war chest accumulated from citizen donations for that purpose.

If they were the slightest bit interested in either voting system integrity or actually winning, they would have litigated the Black Box Voting records requests to apply some real muscle into prompt disclosure of audit materials, at least in Ohio and Florida. Failure to comply with sunshine laws is against the law, yet a citizens group like Black Box Voting cannot claim legal urgency, forcing immediate compliance, in the same way that a campaign can. There is no question that if the campaign had enforced the sunshine laws, analyzing the audit data, two things would have happened:

1) records would have been produced 2) auditing would have been enabled, and we all know that would have produced hard evidence of irregularities....

The Kerry attorney in Volusia, by the way, came by but asked not a single question, never asked to look at any evidence, and told one of the producers of Votergate that he thought Black Box Voting was just here to "stir up trouble."

3. How do they corrupt our politicians? In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes about "when the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over.... I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me."

That photo of kerry and Theresa was taken shortly after the election loss. Do they look sad?



ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.benfrank.net/nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=272