RFK Jr. Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Thanks to SB for passing this along. --RB
URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Rollingstone.com

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)


Next page

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For the continuation of this article which includes 208 footnotes, see:

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen


1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.

3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June 22, 2005. Page 5

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The Hill, November 4, 2004.

19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,'' Associated Press, December 11, 2004.

Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.

23) Mitofsky International

24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.'' FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.

43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,'' Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.''

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.

66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.


ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

Liz Cheney: Dad's Enforcer

Here's another in Dreyfuss' extraordinary exposes of Cheney's control of government. His daughter Liz, turns out to inherit her father's imperiousness, not to mention his extreme radical ideology. In an unprecedented promotion for someone with no Middle East experience, she gets to be the top gatekeeper at State's Middle East desk, riding roughshod even over ambassadors -- with a very occasional comeuppance as detailed below.As Dreyfuss documents, it's the Cheneys who are leading the charge for regime change in Syria and Iran. --RB


The Commissar’s in Town
T@P Very little happens at State regarding the Middle East without the knowledge and approval of Cheney -- not Dick, but Liz, his powerful, secretive daughter.
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11540
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 06.06.06


At the very heart of U.S. Middle East policy, from the war in Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria to the spread of free-market democracy in the region, sits the 39-year-old daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, appointed to her post in February 2005, has a tongue-twisting title: principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives. By all accounts, it is an enormously powerful post, and one for which she is uniquely unqualified.

During the past 15 months, Elizabeth Cheney has met with and bolstered a gaggle of Syrian exiles, often in tandem with John Hannah and David Wurmser, top officials in the Office of the Vice President (OVP); has pressed hard for money to accelerate the administration’s ever more overt campaign for forced regime change in both Damascus and Teheran; and has overseen an increasingly discredited push for American-inspired democratic reform from Morocco to Iran. With the unspoken support of her father, Cheney has kept a hawk’s eye on Iraq policy within the department, intimidating opponents of the neoconservative axis within the administration. And, less visibly, according to former officials who’ve worked with her, she has made her influence felt in choosing officials, selecting (or blocking) the appointment of ambassadors and other foreign service officers, and weighing in on other bureaucratic battles at the department.

Now, according to the Financial Times of London, Cheney is coordinating the work of a new entity called the Iran-Syria Operations Group. The unit was established “to plot a more aggressive democracy promotion strategy for those two ‘rogue’ states,” reported the Times. In February, the State Department announced that Cheney would oversee a $5 million program to “accelerate the work of reformers in Syria,” providing grants of up to $1 million each to Syrian dissidents. And in the current fiscal year, she will oversee a similar, $7 million regime-change grant program for Iran, though funding for that effort is expected to grow to at least $85 million soon, to include both a propaganda program and support to Iranian opposition groups.

“She came in knowing very little about the Middle East,” says Marina S. Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues. “She had a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. … They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn’t interfere with policy.”

Liz Cheney catapulted into her current job after a rather undistinguished career that leapfrogged from public to private life and back again. In her early 20s, she did a stint at the State Department while her father was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and then headed to law school at the University of Chicago and worked for Armitage Associates, a firm run by Richard Armitage. As an attorney, she worked for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, and served briefly as a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) officer in Hungary and Poland. Her Middle East experience was, well, limited.

Asked about Liz’s familiarity with the Middle East, a former staffer at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says that she dabbled in the Institute’s Arabic language classes. “And she’d come to our annual conference,” she said. That’s it.

That was, however, apparently enough to get her named deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) in 2002.

* * *

In an administration in which policy toward Iraq and the Middle East was mostly guided by know-nothings and the inexperienced, perhaps it isn’t surprising that Liz Cheney got herself named to a top position at Near Eastern Affairs. How, exactly, she ended up at NEA in the first place is something of a mystery, although no one interviewed doubted that it was at the behest of the vice president. One former deputy assistant secretary at NEA said that the bureau was offered the choice of either Liz Cheney or Danielle Pletka, a neoconservative hard-liner who is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Pletka, a sharp-elbowed insider who helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in the 1990s, was reportedly seen by Secretary of State Colin Powell and NEA as the greater of two evils, and so Cheney got the job.

During the preparations for the Iraq War, Cheney had a back seat at NEA, with a portfolio covering Middle East economic issues, including oil. However, according to insiders, her real importance was to serve as an ace-in-the-hole at the State Department for the vice president’s office. Her presence had a sobering effect on many of the department’s Arabists, most of whom were known as opponents of the war and were considered suspect by neoconservatives. “All during that year, you had the vice president’s daughter sitting there at State Department meetings,” says Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Says another former U.S. ambassador to several key Middle East countries otherwise known for his tough-minded ability to stand up to Arab strongmen: “I would find it confining, if not intimidating.”

In 2003, she left the State Department to take a role in the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and to give birth to her fourth child. (Her husband is Philip Perry, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security.) But after the election, in 2005, she was back -- this time with an important, and telling, promotion to the far more senior post of principal deputy assistant secretary, making her the No. 2 official on Middle East policy. Known by its acronym, PDAS (pronounced “pee-dass”), it is a bureaucratic post known for its power inside NEA. It was an appointment that certainly got the attention of the State Department’s Middle East hands.

“There has always been a political appointee in every bureau at State,” says Ambassador Philip Wilcox, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. But usually the political appointee, who serves as a sort of commissar, would be placed in a low rank within NEA, he says. “The idea that the pdas would be that political appointee is just unprecedented, since she serves as the alter ego of the assistant secretary.”

Wayne White, who served as deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and who headed that unit’s Iraq team during the war, left the State Department in 2005. “The thing we all said among us, in chit chat, when she moved up to be PDAS after being the deputy assistant secretary, was, ‘Ah, now we see the plan,’” he says. “First, she gets her training wheels as deputy assistant secretary … where she’d get softer assignments, sort of training, which happens to people in that position who don’t have a Middle East background, and she doesn’t -- and then boom! right up to PDAS … She is in a position to stop anything from going forward -- as in the form of a memo, a recommendation -- that she pretty much wants.”

In her job as PDAS, Cheney is responsible for nearly all of the management and administration of the bureau, says White. “In one way, the PDAS is like Stalin in the early 1920s communist party, controlling personnel, able to promote, not promote, put people in key positions. This is an extremely powerful position.”

David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for NEA, is nominally Liz Cheney’s boss. But her connection to her father, plus her pipelines directly up to more senior State Department officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, make it easy for her to eclipse Welch. (Like Armitage, who also served as a top State Department official for George W. Bush, Zoellick is a signatory to the statements of the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, which charted the administration’s bellicose course.) “David Welch is in an impossible position on anything she takes an interest in,” says a former top NEA official. “And she takes an interest in the big issues -- Iraq, Iran, and so on. They have to be very careful, if they want to do anything that protects the national interest, because it has to coincide with what Liz Cheney thinks is in the national interest.” One of the few reporters in Washington to look into Liz Cheney’s role at the State Department, Timothy Phelps of Long Island’s Newsday, reported in April that she operates what is essentially a “shadow Middle East policy” against the more mainstream policy promoted by Welch, typical of the neoconservative versus realist divisions that have plagued the Bush administration since 2001.

Cheney has not shied away from throwing her weight around. During her frequent trips to the Middle East, she often operates independently of the department and of the U.S. ambassador in whatever country she is visiting. She has been known to insist on seeing a head of state without inviting the American ambassador to accompany her, in violation of protocol, often threatening the ambassador with the power of her contacts. On at least one occasion, however, an ambassador called her bluff. “Liz Cheney comes out to this country, and she tells the ambassador -- and she doesn’t outrank him -- she tells the ambassador, ‘You’re not going in the meeting with me,’” recalls Larry Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s assistant during his tenure as secretary of state. “And he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m going in the meeting with you. You’re not going into a meeting with the head of state without me.’ And she says, ‘Nope -- would you like a telephone call?’” In this case, says Wilkerson, the department’s bosses backed up their ambassador, who accompanied a chastened Cheney into the meeting. But that has not always been the case. “It’s not just that she is imperious in dealing with our ambassadors,” notes a corporate lobbyist who is deeply involved in Middle East policy. “She’s got her own foreign policy, her own agenda, and so of course she wouldn’t want the ambassador to know what she is talking about when she meets a head of state.”

* * *

Soon after her return to the State Department in March 2005, Liz Cheney made news when she convened a controversial meeting with a handful of exiled Syrian activists to talk about regime change in Damascus. Leading the pack at the time was Farid al-Ghadry, a paradoxically pro-Israeli Syrian who’s maintained ties to neoconservatives in Washington and who is close to Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser, the director of Middle East affairs for the Hudson Institute. According to Arab sources, it was Meyrav Wurmser who helped to arrange al-Ghadry’s tête-à-tête with Liz Cheney, Hannah, and other Bush administration officials.

Al-Ghadry, a Virginia businessman who founded the Reform Party of Syria, is widely seen in Arab circles as a lightweight with no credibility inside Syria. Mourhaf Jouejati, a professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on Syrian politics, calls al-Ghadry a “mini-me of Ahmed Chalabi,” adding that Liz Cheney, Hannah, and the Wurmsers “are the backbone for Farid Ghadry’s movement. The question is, are they just seeking leverage with Syria, or is it a serious option? If it is the latter, I would be scared, because that means that they don’t know what they are doing.” One of the Syrians who took part in the meeting with Cheney and Hannah is Najib Ghadbian, an activist, author, and professor at the University of Arkansas. “Ghadry doesn’t have much following inside Syria,” Ghadbian admits. “Why are they behind him so much? Maybe they are following the Iraqi model, but al-Ghadry doesn’t even have the clout of Chalabi.” Perhaps another reason that al-Ghadry had the inside track with Cheney, Hannah, and Wurmser is that he is a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who has spoken at meetings of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank whose board of advisers includes Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Woolsey. (Since the meeting with Cheney a year ago, al-Ghadry has lost favor even in Syrian exile circles. A new group, calling itself the Syrian National Council, has emerged, elbowing al-Ghadry out of a leading role.)

Since then, and with the emergence of the reported Iran-Syria Operations Group, Liz Cheney has taken a leading role in the Bush administration’s campaign for regime change in both countries. While continuing to press Syria, the State Department has launched a campaign against Iran, separately from any military confrontation being worked on at the Pentagon. “It looks so déjà vu,” says Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who compares the effort to America’s actions before war in Iraq. In addition to pressing the United Nations to impose tough new sanctions against Iran, Liz Cheney is coordinating an effort to rouse Iranian exiles to spark revolution inside the country. Besides seeking $75 million in additional funds for anti-Tehran activities, the State Department has created a brand new Office of Iranian Affairs, which sounds suspiciously like the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans that was set up to coordinate pre-war planning for Iraq. And, according to a recent State Department planning document, the United States is setting up anti-Iranian intelligence and mobilization centers in Dubai, Istanbul, Ankara, Adana, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, London, and Baku to work with “Iranian expatriate communities.”

Having set into motion much of this activity, Liz Cheney’s role in once again up in the air. Many at the State Department may breathe a sigh of relief this summer, when Cheney will once again likely take a leave of absence for the birth of her fifth child, expected in July. Even so, she will remain part of her father’s inner circle. And as the United States lurches toward a confrontation with Iran -- October Surprise anyone? -- Liz and Dick will be hand in hand.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent.
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

*M.Whitney (10/05)Deconstructing Judy Miller's Confession + Cheney too?

*M.Whitney (10/05)Deconstructing Judy Miller's Confession + Cheney too?


Whitney's is the clearest article I've seen outlining Miller's and Cheney's criminal liabilities. Note also the following:

Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war.

I'm wondering what day to day role Sulzberger may have played. Clearly there was no managing or executive editorial control over Miller, but is there any information on what hands on role if any S may have played in greasing her way to those front page WMD stories?


If 10% of Whitney's optimism is on target, we're one (or a series of) indictment (s) away from bringing down the most criminal government this country has ever seen (a remarkable replica of Sinclair Lewis's _It Can't Happen Here_). I'm not a betting person, but here's one event I'd like to bet on. What are the odds?

See below for The (NY) Daily News speculating that the long knives may gather up Cheney himself.
Note: 6.1.06 -- I'm leaving the above in just to show how even the most jaded can relax into ridiculous optimism. I guess that's why we go on: we're always hoping. I guess without it, we can't live.
--RB

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10172005.html
October 17, 2005

Last Gasp Before the Indictments?
Miller's Confession
By MIKE WHITNEY

If you plan to read Judy Miller's long and circuitous apology in the New York Times Sunday edition, bring your hip-waders. The obfuscating manure is knee-deep and bound to stymie even the most curious reader.

Miller's a slippery customer, but a picture is slowly developing of someone who was deeply involved in White House maneuverings to discredit Joseph Wilson.

It's clear now that Dick Cheney's right-hand man, Scooter Libby provided Miller with the name of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's name appears at least twice in the notebook Miller used when she interviewed Libby although she pretends that she cannot remember whether or not he furnished the name.

It's also clear that Libby tried to coerce Miller into silence by dispatching his lawyer, Joseph Tate, to tell Miller that she "was free to testify" but that Libby "had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife." In other words, Libby lied to the Grand Jury and was signaling to Miller to shut up. If Miller told the truth she knew that Libby would go to jail and the administration would be exposed as plotting to disgrace Joseph Wilson.

Fortunately, Miller got tired of her role as 1st amendment martyr and decided to testify. That prompted Libby to send her a frantic letter which stated that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me." Libby was informing Miller as clearly as possible that she was the key figure in the investigation and advising her not to spill the beans.

Miller had a problem though, she had no way of knowing what the other reporters had said to the Grand Jury and she also had to weigh the possibilities of being indicted on perjury or obstruction charges. So she did what most people would do in her situation; she tip-toed through the questioning "denying and forgetting" as much as possible.

It's beginning to look like Miller is the pivotal figure in investigation and her role could be the undoing of the Bush regime. In one telling comment, Millers notes that (2 days before Robert Novak's article appeared in the Washington Post exposing CIA agent Valerie Plame) "I MIGHT HAVE CALLED OTHERS ABOUT MR WILSON'S WIFE".

Really? Two days before Novak's earth-shaking article Miller was giving out Plame's name?!?

This suggests that Miller may have been the ONLY reporter who got Plame's name from Libby and then spread it around to everyone else. No wonder Libby's so worried. That puts Miller at the very center of the Bush administration's biggest nightmare. Miller already admitted that Libby had told her that Plame "worked at Winpac. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the CIA that, among other things, analyses the spread of unconventional weapons." (NY Times)

That's an odd thing to confide in a reporter if it's not intended to start a "leak". Remember, Miller never even wrote a story about anything she gathered from these private interviews with Libby.

So, what was her role? Were they just friends having a casual conversation or was she a mule for the information that the White House wanted to disseminate about Wilson?

Libby also asked Miller to have the Times refer to him as a "former Hill staffer" rather than "a senior administration official" in stories written about Wilson. He obviously didn't want it to seem like the administration was carrying out a personal vendetta against Wilson.

No problem. The administration makes a request and the New York Times carries it out forthwith. One hand washes the other.

The question remains, though, why the cover-up? Why would Libby care what the papers call him if, as he claims, he wasn't doing anything wrong?

The larger question is, however, where did Libby get Valerie Plame's name? The only person who would have had access to classified CIA information like that would have been his boss, Dick Cheney.

Ah-ha!

Cheney presided over a secret group of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Their mission was to promote the danger of Saddam's WMD and discredit those who tried to mitigate the danger. The biggest part of their strategy was to exaggerate the threat of Saddam's imaginary nuclear weapons program. The administration knew through their own polling data that the American people would support a preemptive war if it appeared as though Saddam had nuclear weapons. So, it was incumbent on them to make the case.

Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times, challenged the administration's conclusions about Niger yellow-cake uranium, and undermined the claims about Saddam's nuclear capacity. So, Wilson had to be destroyed.

Miller, who had served as the conduit for most of the administration's phony stories about biological weapons sites, mobile-weapons labs, and aluminum tubes for nukes; was the logical choice to start the smear campaign against Wilson. Her role was to spread the "classified information" to her sources in the media who would, in turn, discredit Wilson.

Libby has done his best to protect Cheney from being implicated, saying that the VP didn't know anything about Wilson, but the claim is absurd. As Jason Leopold notes in Raw Story, "Cheney was present at several of the WHIG's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration "twisted" prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be." ("Vice President's Role in outing of CIA agent under Examination", Jason Leopold)

Leopold's article also points out the cozy relationship between the Miller and the members of WHIG prior to the Iraq war. After Miller had written her damning article about aluminum tubes in Iraq that could be used as centrifuges in nuclear weapons (a story that was later discredited); Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Rice swung into high-gear, flooding the Sunday talk-shows and citing the story as proof that Saddam's nukes would ultimately engulf America in a "mushroom cloud".

The media's disinformation-campaign must have been coordinated with Miller and key members of the Bush administration. The plan worked flawlessly. Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war. Neither has ever expressed any regret over the role they played.

Libby's Caveat

Ironically, Libby's cryptic comments to Miller may turn out to be the best summary of the ongoing investigation. He said, "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

Yes, and if Libby goes down, so will Cheney, Rove, Card, Rice, and perhaps even Bush, because "their roots connect them".

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com


From Laura Rozen's blog:
http://warandpiece.com/
Holy Moly,
From the Daily News

A special prosecutor's intensifying focus into who outed a CIA spy has raised questions whether Vice President Cheney himself is involved, knowledgeable sources confirmed yesterday.

At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.

In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

Cheney was questioned last year byprosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.

Libby and President Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove remain the focus of the probe into whether Plame's cover was blown in a scheme to embarrass her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked claims that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

Libby is often described as "Cheney's Cheney," a loyal and discreet lieutenant who shares his boss's hard-line philosophy and bareknuckle attitude toward political enemies of the Bush administration.

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president.

"Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"

The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...

Who could the senior cooperating witness be?
[In her update, not shown here, Rozen guesses that it might be Fleischer or Grossman.]

Friends:

Whitney's is the clearest article I've seen outlining Miller's and Cheney's criminal liabilities. Note also the following:

Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war.

At the risk of totally exposing my ignorance and complete naiveté, I'm wondering what day to day role Sulzberger may have played. Clearly there was no managing or executive editorial control over Miller, but is there any information on what hands on role if any S may have played in greasing her way to those front page WMD stories?


If 10% of Whitney's optimism is on target, we're one (or a series of) indictment (s) away from bringing down the most criminal government this country has ever seen (a remarkable replica of Sinclair Lewis's _It Can't Happen Here_). I'm not a betting person, but here's one event I'd like to bet on. What are the odds?

See below for The (NY) Daily News speculating that the long knives may gather up Cheney himself.

--RB

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10172005.html
October 17, 2005

Last Gasp Before the Indictments?
Miller's Confession
By MIKE WHITNEY

If you plan to read Judy Miller's long and circuitous apology in the New York Times Sunday edition, bring your hip-waders. The obfuscating manure is knee-deep and bound to stymie even the most curious reader.

Miller's a slippery customer, but a picture is slowly developing of someone who was deeply involved in White House maneuverings to discredit Joseph Wilson.

It's clear now that Dick Cheney's right-hand man, Scooter Libby provided Miller with the name of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's name appears at least twice in the notebook Miller used when she interviewed Libby although she pretends that she cannot remember whether or not he furnished the name.

It's also clear that Libby tried to coerce Miller into silence by dispatching his lawyer, Joseph Tate, to tell Miller that she "was free to testify" but that Libby "had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife." In other words, Libby lied to the Grand Jury and was signaling to Miller to shut up. If Miller told the truth she knew that Libby would go to jail and the administration would be exposed as plotting to disgrace Joseph Wilson.

Fortunately, Miller got tired of her role as 1st amendment martyr and decided to testify. That prompted Libby to send her a frantic letter which stated that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me." Libby was informing Miller as clearly as possible that she was the key figure in the investigation and advising her not to spill the beans.

Miller had a problem though, she had no way of knowing what the other reporters had said to the Grand Jury and she also had to weigh the possibilities of being indicted on perjury or obstruction charges. So she did what most people would do in her situation; she tip-toed through the questioning "denying and forgetting" as much as possible.

It's beginning to look like Miller is the pivotal figure in investigation and her role could be the undoing of the Bush regime. In one telling comment, Millers notes that (2 days before Robert Novak's article appeared in the Washington Post exposing CIA agent Valerie Plame) "I MIGHT HAVE CALLED OTHERS ABOUT MR WILSON'S WIFE".

Really? Two days before Novak's earth-shaking article Miller was giving out Plame's name?!?

This suggests that Miller may have been the ONLY reporter who got Plame's name from Libby and then spread it around to everyone else. No wonder Libby's so worried. That puts Miller at the very center of the Bush administration's biggest nightmare. Miller already admitted that Libby had told her that Plame "worked at Winpac. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the CIA that, among other things, analyses the spread of unconventional weapons." (NY Times)

That's an odd thing to confide in a reporter if it's not intended to start a "leak". Remember, Miller never even wrote a story about anything she gathered from these private interviews with Libby.

So, what was her role? Were they just friends having a casual conversation or was she a mule for the information that the White House wanted to disseminate about Wilson?

Libby also asked Miller to have the Times refer to him as a "former Hill staffer" rather than "a senior administration official" in stories written about Wilson. He obviously didn't want it to seem like the administration was carrying out a personal vendetta against Wilson.

No problem. The administration makes a request and the New York Times carries it out forthwith. One hand washes the other.

The question remains, though, why the cover-up? Why would Libby care what the papers call him if, as he claims, he wasn't doing anything wrong?

The larger question is, however, where did Libby get Valerie Plame's name? The only person who would have had access to classified CIA information like that would have been his boss, Dick Cheney.

Ah-ha!

Cheney presided over a secret group of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Their mission was to promote the danger of Saddam's WMD and discredit those who tried to mitigate the danger. The biggest part of their strategy was to exaggerate the threat of Saddam's imaginary nuclear weapons program. The administration knew through their own polling data that the American people would support a preemptive war if it appeared as though Saddam had nuclear weapons. So, it was incumbent on them to make the case.

Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times, challenged the administration's conclusions about Niger yellow-cake uranium, and undermined the claims about Saddam's nuclear capacity. So, Wilson had to be destroyed.

Miller, who had served as the conduit for most of the administration's phony stories about biological weapons sites, mobile-weapons labs, and aluminum tubes for nukes; was the logical choice to start the smear campaign against Wilson. Her role was to spread the "classified information" to her sources in the media who would, in turn, discredit Wilson.

Libby has done his best to protect Cheney from being implicated, saying that the VP didn't know anything about Wilson, but the claim is absurd. As Jason Leopold notes in Raw Story, "Cheney was present at several of the WHIG's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration "twisted" prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be." ("Vice President's Role in outing of CIA agent under Examination", Jason Leopold)

Leopold's article also points out the cozy relationship between the Miller and the members of WHIG prior to the Iraq war. After Miller had written her damning article about aluminum tubes in Iraq that could be used as centrifuges in nuclear weapons (a story that was later discredited); Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Rice swung into high-gear, flooding the Sunday talk-shows and citing the story as proof that Saddam's nukes would ultimately engulf America in a "mushroom cloud".

The media's disinformation-campaign must have been coordinated with Miller and key members of the Bush administration. The plan worked flawlessly. Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war. Neither has ever expressed any regret over the role they played.

Libby's Caveat

Ironically, Libby's cryptic comments to Miller may turn out to be the best summary of the ongoing investigation. He said, "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

Yes, and if Libby goes down, so will Cheney, Rove, Card, Rice, and perhaps even Bush, because "their roots connect them".

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com


From Laura Rozen's blog:
http://warandpiece.com/
Holy Moly,
From the Daily News

A special prosecutor's intensifying focus into who outed a CIA spy has raised questions whether Vice President Cheney himself is involved, knowledgeable sources confirmed yesterday.

At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.

In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

Cheney was questioned last year byprosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.

Libby and President Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove remain the focus of the probe into whether Plame's cover was blown in a scheme to embarrass her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked claims that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

Libby is often described as "Cheney's Cheney," a loyal and discreet lieutenant who shares his boss's hard-line philosophy and bareknuckle attitude toward political enemies of the Bush administration.

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president.

"Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"

The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...

Who could the senior cooperating witness be?
[In her update, not shown here, Rozen guesses that it might be Fleischer or Grossman.]