THANK YOU!
O mighty and powerful God
for wiping the blight
of Indigenous Filth
from our Bless’d White Continent.
if this sentiment seems to stick in your throat
like a piece of broken glass mistaken for candy
read THIS
it AINT over…
On March 11, 2003, as final preparations were under way for the neo-cons’ greatest triumph–the invasion of Iraq–New Yorker magazine investigative reporter Seymour Hersh exposed an extortion scheme by neo-con Richard Perle, to extract tens of millions of dollars out of the Saudi royal family, in league with the infamous Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The scheme involved a Perle company, Trireme Partners LP, which wanted a piece of the billions of dollars in homeland security contracts soon to be issued by the Kingdom. The proposal, according to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, smacked of a quid pro quo: Perle, a leading critic of the Saudi regime, would drop the propaganda barrage and the calls for regime change, coming out of his Defense Policy Board, and the Saudis would cough up.
Several senior U.S. intelligence officials recently told EIR that some higher-ups in the Saudi royal family, perhaps including Prince Bandar, who is now the national security advisor to King Abdullah, regret that they didn’t take the bait and pay off Perle and his partners back in January 2003. A few million dollars might have saved them several years of headaches, as the neo-con propaganda Wurlitzer waged a non-stop regime-change campaign against them. But even more to the point, suddenly, the Saudis, along with several other Sunni Arab regimes, find themselves as strange bedfellows with Washington’s neo-cons and with the Ehud Olmert government in Israel–in common cause against Iran.
A Nov. 3, 2006 teaser from Vanity Fair magazine revealed that the neo-cons are going through a major retooling–wiping their hands of the entire Iraq fiasco, and placing the blame for the failure squarely on the shoulders of President George W. Bush and his team of national security incompetents and nincompoops. In a preview of a story to appear in the January 2007 Vanity Fair, author David Rose delivered excerpts from interviews he conducted in October 2006 with some of the cream of the neo-con crap–starting with the “Prince of Darkness,’ Perle himself, and also including Kenneth Adelman, who gained infamy by proposing that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a “cakewalk’; Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and Michael Rubin.
Lovers of Iraqi faker Ahmed Chalabi, and Iraq warhawks to a man, these neo-cons are now saying that if they had it to do over again, knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Rice team was the most incompetent national security management group in the post-World War II history of America, they would have opted for an alternative to war.
In a scene worthy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, these modern-day Brutuses have stabbed President Bush and Condi Rice in the back. As far as the neo-cons are concerned, according to a number of informed Washington sources, both Iraq and George W. Bush are yesterday’s news. They are now preparing to survive the fall of the House of Bush, and are already making plans for the next confrontations: against Iran and Russia, to name the top two targets du jour.
While the Bush Presidency is flaming out in the aftermath of what has been dubbed the “Nov. 7th Massacre,’ the neo-cons are still a formidable force inside the Republican Party, with some leading neo-con superstars, like John Podhoretz, already touting Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the elephant they intend to ride back into the Oval Office. Across the aisle, another crew of hardcore neo-cons is preparing to surface within the Democratic Party, should a donkey take the Presidency in 2008. It is reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter era, when scores of life-long “Scoop Jackson Democrats,’ led by Perle, Stephen Bryen, Ledeen, Gaffney, and Elliott Abrams, slithered over to the GOP as “Reagan Democrats,’ and, after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter, occupied top civilian posts at the Pentagon, and cushy consulting jobs with the Reagan National Security Council.
Whichever party lands in the White House come January 2009, the neo-cons hope to be there to share in the spoils. Either way, they are busily organizing a “Get Iran’ war alliance with frightened Sunni regimes in the Persian Gulf and Arab world and Israel–to make sure that the Bush-Cheney regime commits one more fatal atrocity–a military strike on Iran’s purported secret nuclear weapons sites–before leaving office.
To make sure that this Iran war happens before Team Bush leaves office, the neo-cons are working through their one reliable partner remaining inside the regime–Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney’s office remains Neo-con Central, with David Wurmser and John Hannah still on staff. Elliott Abrams remains the Cheney “mole’ at the National Security Council.
According to Middle East and Washington sources, this crew was responsible, earlier this year, for trashing all efforts by the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad to reopen direct peace talks with Israel, talks that no Israeli regime prior to that of Ariel Sharon, would have flat-out rejected, no matter how much pressure came down from Washington.
More recently, they are reportedly pushing a covert weapons-smuggling operation into the West Bank, arming Fatah factions to launch what would rapidly become a full-scale civil war against Hamas. The noted retired Israeli general, Shlomo Brom, in a recent paper for the Jaffe Center at Tel Aviv University, warned that such an outbreak of communal violence among the Palestinians would be bad for Israel, provoking a likely split between a Fatah-controlled West Bank and a Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Both sides would be vying to prove that they are more effective in terrorizing Israel, through suicide bombings and rocket attacks, the general warned, and this would make life unbearable in the Jewish state. Arab sources have added that in his recent trip to Washington, Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was given a similar offer of “covert military aid’ to take on Hezbollah inside that war-ruined nation, which still hasn’t recovered from its 15-year civil war (1975-90). Such covert operations, aimed at provoking the neo-cons’ beloved perpetual warfare throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region, do not depend on Pentagon muscle, so the departure of Donald Rumsfeld from the scene, and his replacement by former CIA Director Robert Gates, a Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III ally (and presumable a Dick Cheney enemy), does not necessarily interfere with the game.
In fact, as the Democrats prepare to take back control of the U.S. House and Senate in January 2007, they face a world map of hot-spots, all set to blow, with the slightest provocation.
Several senior Washington intelligence veterans, and one regional vice president of a major U.S. defense firm, say that their greatest fear–between now and the New Year when the Democrats take the keys to Capitol Hill back–is a “Gulf of Tonkin’ incident, a provocation covertly arranged originating from Washington, that would provide the pretext for war. The most likely target of such a scheme: Iran. The most likely architect of such an operation: Dick Cheney and his remaining coterie of neo-con troublemakers and whatever assets they have recruited from within the Special Forces community and the “black operations’ side of the intelligence community. One burning question is whether President Bush has already signed a Presidential Intelligence Finding, authorizing these covert tricks.
On Oct. 10, 2006, the web-based magazine World Politics Watch ran a provocative story, echoing the new neo-con scheme, under the headline “Mideast Realignment: Could Iran Unite Arabs and Israelis?’ Noting the rumors, officially denied by both sides, that Prince Bandar had secretly met in Jordan with a top Israeli government official, Frida Ghitis wrote that “a handful of Middle East observers were not surprised to hear of possible talks between Israel and the kingdom. That’s because they predict a major realignment will reshape this region. The cause,’ she continued, “of this gradual but far-reaching political transformation is fear of Shi’ite Iran by Sunni Arabs. As a result, the traditional enemy of Arabs, Israel, could gradually begin developing a subtle but powerful alliance with Sunni Muslim regimes in the Arab world…. It is this natural convergence of interests that has the potential to recast the political landscape from the traditional one of Arabs versus Israelis, which has dominated the Middle East since the late 1940s, into a Sunni vs. Shi’a alignment, with Israel and Sunni governments on the same side.’
This, Washington sources emphasize, is the latest neo-con wet dream. For years the neo-cons have been preaching their own brand of Leon Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution,’ masked in the cry for “democracy.’ From the start of the Bush-Cheney regime up to recent months, the number one target of these latter-day Jacobins had been what Middle Eastern historians referred to as the “Sunni Stability Belt,’ the ruling combination of hardline monarchies and dictatorships that kept the oil patch safe and stable from the time of Sykes-Picot (1916) on. Now that the neo-con “Shi’ite Card’ has turned Iraq into Hell-on-Earth, the flexible neo-con fantasists have modified their rhetoric, to suddenly find common cause with the very Sunni Arab monarchs and dictators whom they targetted only months ago, with such schemes as their 1996 “A Clean Break.’
The neo-cons are shameless sophists, who have no problem distorting the truth beyond recognition–if it suits their goal of perpetual power. Will the Sunni Arab lions and the Israelis be so stupid as to walk into this trap?
Stay tuned.
It only took six years for Americans to comprehend George Bush and the Republican Party and to realize that the Republicans were not leading America in any promising directions.
Exit polls and interviews with voters across the country by CNN political analyst Bill Schneider show that the November 2006 election was a vote against both Bush and the war in Iraq. Schneider reports that voters did not even know the name of the Democrats for whom they voted. Voters said: “I am going to vote Democrat, because I don’t like Bush, I don’t like the war. I want to make a statement.”
I believe that voters recognized that the peril of one-party rule is that political accountability exists no where except at the ballot box. With the Republican built and programmed electronic voting machines, even accountability at the ballot box was disappearing.
Americans realized that they had made a serious mistake giving power to one party, and they rectified it.
With Republican control of the legislative branch ended, Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was immediately swept from power. With the troops, generals, and the service newspapers calling for Rumsfeld’s head, only the delusional warmonger, Vice President Richard Cheney, wanted to keep Rumsfeld in power.
It was a battle that Cheney lost. Cheney’s defeat is an indication that reality has elbowed its way back into Republican consciousness, pushing hubris and delusion away from the control they have exercised over political power.
The lust for unbridled power proved to be too strong a temptation for normally cautious Republicans. The Republicans waved the flag and shouted “terrorist sympathizer” at every civil libertarian who attempted to defend the US Constitution, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions’ proscriptions against torture, and America’s reputation from a nazified US Dept of Justice (sic) and a president who behaved–with the approval of Republicans–as if he were above the law. In violation of his oath of office, Bush used signing statements to negate laws passed by Congress, not with a veto, but with his personal opinion. Bush, thus, elevated himself above the rule of law that has protected America from becoming a tyranny and made a mockery of the separation of powers that are a foundation of American liberty.
Americans may not have understood this as clearly as the Founding Fathers did, but the people recognized, however dimly, a problem and exercised corrective action. The question now is: what will the Democrats do?
The Democrats clearly have no mandate for their pet issues of gun control, homosexual marriage, and higher taxes–especially at a time when the average American is deeper in personal debt than at any other time in history and jobs are being offshored at a rapid rate destroying the economic prospects of the American people.
After the years of illegal war and the overnight destruction of civil liberties that were 800 years in their creation, the United States stands at a watershed. If the legislation that has been put on the books permitting spying on Americans without a court warrant, legalizing torture and self-incrimination, and repealing habeas corpus and the right to an attorney remains on the books, the United States will be a police state regardless of which party is in power.
If the Democrats are to make a real difference, their first task is to repeal the Orwellian-named “Patriot Acts,” the torture legislation, the detention without court evidence legislation, and the right-to-spy and invade privacy without court warrant legislation. The White House tyrant needs to be quickly told that one more “signing statement” and he will be impeached, convicted, and turned over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague.
The notion that Americans can be protected from “terror” by giving up the Bill of Rights is absurd. Democrats are complicit in this absurd notion. Many were intimidated into voting for police state legislation, because they lacked the intestinal fortitude to call police state legislation by its own name. The legislation that has been passed during the Bush regime is far more dangerous to Americans than Muslim terrorists.
Indeed, the prime cause of Muslim terrorism is the US interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries and America’s one-sided stance in favor of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Jimmy Carter was president, his even-handed approach made the US respected throughout the Muslim world. 9/11, if it was actually an act of Muslim terrorism, was the direct consequence of US one-sided meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.
When, and only when, the Democrats have erased the Bush administration’s police state legislation from the books, thus restoring the Constitution, they should clear the air on two other issues of major importance. The Democrats must convene a commission of independent experts to investigate 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report has too many problems and shortcomings to be believable.
Recent polls show that 36 percent of the American people do not believe the report. Such a deficient report is unacceptable. 9/11 became the excuse for the neoconservative Bush regime to launch illegal wars of aggression in the Middle East. The 9/11 Commission Report is nothing but a public relations justification for the “war on terror,” which in truth is a war on American liberty. As long as politicians with a police state mentality can cling to the cover of the 9/11 Commission Report, the Bill of Rights will remain endangered.
The other issue is the blatant corruption in the Bush regime’s contract practices. So many contracts are tainted with their connections to Republican power brokers, including Vice President Richard Cheney, that the taxpayers are being fleeced on the level of the Grant administration. Indictments and long prison sentences are in order.
This leaves the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are lost. Both invasions were illegal. Those responsible must be held accountable.
The American prosecutors of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg emphasized, as Robert Jackson put it, that Germany’s crime was not in losing the war but in starting it. Under the Nuremberg standard, to launch a war of aggression is a war crime. It is punishable with a death sentence.
As the wars are crimes, they must be stopped. Having overthrown a stable secular regime in Iraq, the US and its craven allies have no recourse but to accept that Iraq will break into three states: In the north the Kurds will unite with the Turkish Kurds, and Turkey will have to deal with the situation without US interference. In the south, the Shiites will have an Islamic regime similar to the government in Iran, with whom the Iraqi Shiites will be allied. The Sunnis will be isolated in the middle without any oil.
The US and Britain no longer have any role to play in the Middle East. As the King of Jordan predicted, there is now a Shiite crescent that runs from Iran through Iraq into Lebanon. This Shiite crescent is the most powerful force in the Middle East.
The Iraqi Sunnis can come to terms with Shiite power or be destroyed. The American puppet states of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates are faced with the instability that comes from being allied with the “hegemonic” West against their own people. It is up to their own wits whether they can make the transformation.
The US has neither the resources, the finances, nor the credibility to intervene.
The Israelis have isolated themselves with their genocidal policies against the Palestinians. Intelligent Israelis are already sending their children out of the country. Israeli peace groups have thrown up their hands in the face of the persistent intransigence of the Israeli government and the disregard of common sense. It remains to be seen if the Israelis can learn to care about anyone but their own kind. Israel can save itself if its political leaders will stop pushing Palestinians off of their own land by destroying their homes and orchards and murdering their children, thus turning more Palestinians into refugees. It would be easy for the economically talented Israelis to pull the Palestinians into prosperity, thereby ending the conflict. Are Israelis capable of the humane leadership required to create a place for themselves in the Middle East or are they forever wed to Mao’s dictum that “power comes out of the barrel of a gun”?
Republican rule in the 21st century has devastated American civil liberties and American prestige and leadership capability. Can Democrats restore American liberties and leadership, or will a lust for power corrupt them, too, and cause Democrats to retain the police state powers Bush has created?
If the Bush regime’s police state legislation is still law in 2008, the Democrats will have failed.
what happens if you smash an electronic voting machine?
if im not mistaken a FELONY conviction disqualifies one from voting…no?
interesting conundrum
smash a voting machine..and (stifled cough) get caught
ONE VOTER is permanently (varies by state) in-eligible to vote
but…
allow that machine..and all like it..to REMAIN in operation
and
a GENERATION risks being disenfranchised..
by deceit
by manipulation
by design
conundrum indeed…
indeed.
During the lead-up to the November 7th midterm congressional election, the Republican Party has appeared to be in serious trouble. George W. Bush’s approval ratings have been so consistently low (they’re currently hovering around the mid-30s) that most Republican candidates for seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives have been about as eager to be seen in his company as to fall into the embrace of a carrier of bubonic plague. The Democrats have led by growing margins in every one of the 110 generic opinion polls taken since September 2005, and currently hold a more than 14 percent lead over the Republicans in the “5-poll moving average” used by pollsters as the most reliable guide to trends in public opinion.1
On the reasonable assumption that the Democrats could expect to receive 60 percent of the undecided vote, the noted polling and exit-poll analyst who posts at the Progressive Independent website under the name ‘TruthIsAll’ has calculated their average anticipated share of the November 7th vote, as of October 28th, to be 57.8 percent. He estimates that in an election free from fraud, there is a 97.5 percent probability that Democratic candidates should garner, on average, more that 56.4 percent of the votes cast. Even if the Democrats were to win only half of the undecided vote, they would quite certainly—in a fraud-free election—recover control of the House of Representatives, gaining at least 25 seats. Whether or not they win control of the Senate as well would depend—again assuming a clean election—upon the share of the undecided vote that they receive: the probability that with two-thirds of the undecided vote the Democrats would win control of the Senate is calculated by ‘TruthIsAll’ as 78 percent.2
But it might be premature to get excited over the prospect of the United States ceasing to be a one-party state. For if the Republican party is in trouble with the electorate, American democracy is in a much more parlous condition—thanks largely to the devious machinations of the Bush Republicans. Given the accumulating evidence of large-scale and systematic preparations by the Republicans and their corporate allies for suppression of the Democratic vote, for mis- or non-counting of the vote in Democratic strongholds, and for an unprecedented level of electronic vote-tabulation fraud, the likelihood of these midterm elections being clean is approximately zero.
In the 2000 election, it was only through a combination of Jim Crow vote suppression tactics and a rich array of different methods of vote-count fraud that George W. Bush was able to arrive at a point at which his father’s Supreme Court appointees could push through what has been appropriately described as a judicial coup d’état. His party won control of the Senate in 2002 through what was almost certainly vote-tabulation fraud.3 The 2004 presidential election was marked by fraud on a gigantic scale, not just in Ohio, which ended up being the deciding state, but in many other states as well: by January 2005 there was compelling evidence to show that had the votes been honestly counted, John Kerry would have defeated Bush by a commanding margin.4
My purpose here is not to review yet again the evidence on which these observations are based, but rather to provide a very selective list of recent books, articles and documentary films which assess and analyze the evidence of flagrant Republican breaches of the most fundamental principles of democracy, together with the prospects for a repetition and extension of these fraudulent practices in the 2006 and subsequent elections.
These items are divided into three categories. The first category, “Critical Studies,” includes exemplary work by Steven Freeman (the book he co-authored with Joel Bleifuss is, in my opinion, the single most important of these studies), as well as work by other major contributors to an emerging understanding of the theft of the 2004 election.
In the second section I have listed films, including one by the prize-winning director Dorothy Fadiman, which bring together documentary footage and illuminating interviews with election analysts.
And finally, the short list of items anticipating Republican fraud in the midterm election offers a representative cross-section of current concerns—including evidence of further massive purges of voters’ lists, and evidence from unimpeachable sources that the touch-screen machines manufactured by two of the major suppliers of voting machines, Diebold and Sequoia, have been designed to facilitate electoral fraud.
It’s worth noting, by way of coda, that these skewed machines were hard at work well before election day. According to a report published in the Miami Herald on October 28th, voting machines in Democratic-leaning Broward and Miami-Dade counties in southern Florida had already during the preceding week been detected flipping the choices of early voters from Democratic candidates to Republicans. The problem, as the corporate press likes to insist, must be understood as one of “glitches”—or, more strangely, of a kind of computer fatigue that supposedly induces the video screen “on heavily used machines to slip out of sync” with “the electronics inside.”
Only “conspiracy theorists” or voters rendered “particularly skittish” by “a history of problems at the polls”5 would want to go so far as to suspect that electronic voting machines made by Republican-leaning corporations might be inclined to behave in this way, not because they’re tired or having bad hair days or hissy fits, but because they’ve been programmed to do so.
1. Critical Studies
Baiman, Ron, Kathy Dopp et al. “The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount.” US Count Votes / National Election Data Archive (17 January 2006, revised 23 January 2006), http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf.
DeLozier, Abbe Waldman, and Vickie Karp, eds. Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America. Austin, Texas: Truth Enterprises, 2006.
Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008. Columbus, Ohio: CICJ Books / www.Freepress.org, 2006.
—-, eds. What Happened in Ohio. Columbus, Ohio: CICJ Books / www.Freepress.org, 2006.
Fitrakis, Bob, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, eds. Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election? Essential Documents. Columbus, Ohio: CICJ Books / www.Freepress.org, 2006.
Freeman, Steven F., and Joel Bleifuss. Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006.
Freeman, Steven F. “Who Really Won—and Lost—the 2004 US Presidential Election?” 61st Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Montréal, 19 May 2006. http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/AAPOR060519.pdf.
—-. “Illegitimate election. A key source for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds to criticism of his analysis of the 2004 election.” Salon.com (12 June 2006), http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/12/freeman/print.html.
Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” Rolling Stone (June 2006), http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/Print.
—-. “Will the Next Election Be Hacked?” Rolling Stone (October 2006), http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr_will_the_next_election_be_hacked/print.
Miller, Mark Crispin. Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them). New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Palast, Greg. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. 2nd ed.; New York: Plume, 2004.
—-. Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ’08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. New York: Dutton, 2006.
—-. “Greg Palast Uncovers the ‘Armed Madhouse’ of the Bush Reign of Greed, Fear and Stolen Elections.” A Buzzflash Interview. Buzzflash.com (13 June 2006), http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/06/06/int06022.html.
Peckarsky, Peter, Ron Baiman, and Robert Fitrakis. “Official States Electronic Voting System Added Votes Never Cast In 2004 Presidential Election: Audit Log Missing.” The Free Press (1 November 2006), http://www.freepress.org/images/departments/2209.pdf.
‘TruthIsAll’. TruthIsAll. The Unanswered Question: Who Really Won in 2004? With an Introduction by Democratic Underground Poster Autorank. http://www.truthisall.net.
2. Documentary Films
Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election. Directed by Richard Ray Pérez and Joan Sekler. http://www.unprecedented.org/UnprecedentedFirstPage.html.
Hacking Democracy. Directed by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels. HBO Documentary Films. http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/index,html.
Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System. Directed by David Earnhardt. http://eternalvigilance.us/index.html.
Stealing America: Vote by Vote. Directed by Dorothy Fadiman. http://stealingamerica.org/screenings.html.
Invisible Ballots: A Temptation for Electronic Vote Fraud. Directed by William Gazecki. http://www.realityzone.com/ballots.html.
American Blackout. Directed by Ian Inaba. http://theconnextion.com/american_index.cfm?ArtistID=400.
No Umbrella: Election Day in the City. Directed by Laura Paglin. http://www.noumbrella.org/index.htm.
3. The Next Stolen Election?
Feldman, Ariel J., J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten. “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine.” Center for Information Technology Policy and Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University (13 September 2006), http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf.
Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. “A Loaves & Fishes / Holy Ghost Victory for the GOP in November?” Common Dreams News Center (18 October 2006), http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1018-26.htm.
—-. “Will a shocking new court victory and Karl Rove’s attack on Ohio doom the Democrats nationwide?” The Free Press (2 November 2006); reproduced online at the Centre for Research on Globalization, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FIT20061102&articleid=3681.
Friedman, Brad. “HERE WE GO AGAIN: ‘Just Push the Yellow Button and Vote as Many Times as You Want’ on Sequoia Touch-Screen Voting Machines!” The Brad Blog (2 November 2006), http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3714.
Harris, Bev. “10-31-06: Reports from the front line… Anyone who can get at the yellow button can ruin the election. It takes no password, no computer knowledge, no equipment.” BlackBoxVoting.org (31 October 2006), http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/44823.html.
Jones, Doug. Voting and Elections. http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/%7Ejones/voting/.
Kuttner, Robert. “Hampering the Vote.” The Boston Globe (28 October 2006); reproduced online by Common Dreams News Center (29 October 2006), http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1028-20.htm.
Miller, Mark Crispin. “Our Rigged Elections, Part I: The Elephant in the Polling Booth.” The Washington Spectator (1 October 2006); reproduced online at Truthout.org, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906O.shtml.
—-. “Our Rigged Elections, Part II: The GOP Playbook: How to steal the vote.” The Washington Spectator (15 October 2006); reproduced online at Truthout.org, http://www.treuthout.org/docs_2006/101906O.shtml.
Solar Bus Election Justice Center. http://election.solarbus.org.
Stokes, Jon “Hannibal”. “How to steal an election by hacking the vote.” Arstechnica.com (25 October 2006), http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars.
Warren, Kenneth F., and Steve Freeman. “Instructions for Conducting an Election Verification Exit Poll.” ElectionIntegrity.org (29 October 2006), http://www.electionintegrity.org/Do_Your_Own_Exit_Poll.pdf.
3 One of the more notorious Senate upsets in 2002, Max Cleland’s defeat in Georgia by the chicken-hawk Republican Saxby Chambliss, appeared at the time to be highly suspect. Pre-election polls gave Cleland a 5 percent lead, but Chambliss won by 7 percent in an election that was entirely conducted by Diebold Corporation. In the more recent of his two articles cited below, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. provides evidence from a Diebold insider that immediately prior to the election Diebold’s CEO illegally altered the software in the touch-screen machines which counted the votes.
4 I summarized much of this evidence in my article “The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio,” Centre for Research on Globalization (24 January 2005), http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20050124&articleid=389. (The opening section of that article contains two small errors: the Scioto Country Club at which Kenneth Blackwell spoke is in Columbus, Ohio, not in Scioto County; and Congressman King’s indiscretion dates not from the day of the election, but from a White House barbecue in 2003—a fact that makes it if anything more incriminating.)
5 Charles Rabin and Darran Simon, “Glitches cited in early voting,” The Miami Herald (28 October 2006), http://www.miami.com/mid/miamiherald/news/state/15869924.htm
funny that todays headlines scream..”SADDAM SENTENCED TO DEATH”
funny in a very dark way…
funny because the current US administration
IS THEE MOST AGGREGIOUS CRIMINAL AGAINST HUMANITY that has ever existed in the history OF HISTORY!
We have become all too accustomed over these last years to absorbing insane and astonishing and absurd and awful revelations regarding this White House and this GOP-dominated congress. Some have come to call it “scandal fatigue,” though I personally prefer to call it the “Gotta-put-this-in-a-mental-box-for-a-while-or-else-I-will-eat-my-own-face” self-preservation instinct.
I mean, come on now. No weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and Bush stars in a comedic video skit, aired during a banquet, in which he pretends to look for the stuff in the Oval Office. 2,826 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and 44,799 more have been wounded, not one of them having the luxury of looking for those weapons in the secure comforts of the White House.
Har de har har.
Less than a month after 9/11, Bush got in front of cameras to say, “We need to counter the shock wave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates.” You have to wonder what kind of music this guy is hearing in his head. Hm … here’s a thought. Let’s use the worst day of carnage on American soil since the Civil War to pimp for tax cuts that will pretty much only help the richest of the rich.
This list is seemingly endless. They used September 11 against us to push for an unnecessary war that has laid waste to Iraq and our international reputation. They outed a deep-cover CIA agent whose husband dared to criticize the cherry-picked “intelligence” used to justify the invasion. They have gotten into bed with some of the most reprehensible scumbags ever to disgrace the corridors of Congress - Mr. Abramoff, your table is ready - and then summoned the gall to declare a “National Character Counts Week.”
You have to put this stuff into a mental box until you can wrap yourself around it, because otherwise you’ll be battering down walls with your head and gnawing down trees like a beaver.
But this, now, is something else again.
The New York Times headline for Friday reads, “US Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer.” Bad enough all by itself, true, but this headline does not entirely convey the insane and astonishing and absurd and awful realities behind this story.
“Last March,” begins the article, “the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to ‘leverage the Internet’ to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.”
Translation: On the three-year anniversary of the catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq, Congressional Republicans, terrified that their comprehensive failures would come back to haunt them in the November midterms, cajoled the White House into publishing incredibly sensitive information in a rhetorically empty attempt to cover their backsides.
The Times article continues, “The site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb. The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.”
Translation: We have spent the last five years being terrorized by our own government - “We do not want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud” - and yet these nitwits somehow conclude that publishing detailed directions for the building of nuclear bombs is perfectly fine. You have to wonder if North Korea’s sudden leaps forward in their own nuclear program came because they got a chance to read the user’s manual for the nuclear club. Note well, by the way, that the data published is from before the first Gulf War, which means it has nothing to do with Iraq’s WMD program in 2003, said program having been utterly decimated by sanctions and targeted bombing runs.
And then, the kicker.
“With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war,” reads the Times story, “the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents - most of them in Arabic - would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.”
Translation: “Most of them in Arabic,” it says. Directions for building nuclear weapons, written in Arabic, were published by the White House three years after the invasion, for no better reason than to do some CYA after the weapons of mass destruction failed to turn up in Iraq.
But wait, some will say. The hard part isn’t getting directions for building a bomb; those have been out there for decades now in one form or another. The hard part is procuring or manufacturing the fissionable material needed. Right?
Wrong. Once upon a time, you see, we had something called the Cold War. The artist formerly known as the Soviet Union developed scores of nuclear weapons, and then went broke. Their financial collapse and eventual evaporation as a nation left scads of nuclear materials lying all over their vast territory, with no army available to guard the stuff. They couldn’t even afford padlocks, and suddenly-unpaid nuclear scientists had the opportunity to sell the materials on the black market.
Consider this report from the Center for Defense Information: “The worldwide stockpiles of separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) are estimated to include some 450 tons of military and civilian separated plutonium and over 1,700 tons of HEU. A key problem in this arena is the large stocks of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium that are produced by power reactors. Russia now holds about 150 tons of plutonium and 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium. A recently published report by the National Research Council found that ‘theft or diversion of excess Russian HEU for terrorist use represents a significant near-term threat to the United States.’”
“A complete inventory of Russian materials is not available,” continues the report, “so it is impossible to confirm that diversions of materials have not already occurred. Additionally, there have been more than a dozen seizures of special nuclear material from Russia and surrounding countries since the early 1990s. About 40 kilograms of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium have been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union during the last decade. While most of that material was retrieved, 2 kilograms of highly enriched uranium filched from a research reactor in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia are still missing.”
Fear not, however, because the Bush administration is on top of things. “A program to blend HEU down into less dangerous civilian reactor fuel,” reads a Christian Science Monitor article from 2001, “is moving slowly. Efforts to replace three Russian nuclear reactors that produce both desperately needed energy and plutonium have stalled in a swirl of politics. And the Bush administration, in its first crack at drawing up a national-security budget, has slashed the funding of much of the non-proliferation effort. Bush’s budget took $100 million out of the Department of Energy’s side of the effort, alone.”
The budget allocations for the securing of this material have been annually shortchanged by the Bush administration. Indeed, little has changed since 9/11, despite all the howling about nuclear terrorism coming from the White House.
So, to recap: the administration and its Congressional allies published directions for the development of nuclear weapons, said directions including “charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums.” They did this to try to manufacture some political cover, period. Much of the published material is in Arabic. All that is required to put these directions to practical use is the fissionable material, a great deal of which is sitting unsecured all across Russia … and the administration has slashed the budgets aimed at nailing this stuff down.
Yes, I’m eating my own face.
by William Rivers Pitt
Forget no-fly lists. If Uncle Sam gets its way, beginning on Jan. 14, 2007, we’ll all be on no-fly lists, unless the government gives us permission to leave-or re-enter-the United States.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSA) has proposed that all airlines, cruise lines-even fishing boats-be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States.
It doesn’t matter if you have a U.S. passport-a “travel document” that now, absent a court order to the contrary, gives you a virtually unqualified right to enter or leave the United States, any time you want. When the DHS system comes into effect next January, if the agency says “no” to a clearance request, or doesn’t answer the request at all, you won’t be permitted to enter-or leave-the United States.
Consider what might happen if you’re a U.S. passport holder on assignment in a country like Saudi Arabia. Your visa is about to expire, so you board your flight back to the United States. But wait! You can’t get on, because you don’t have permission from the HSA. Saudi immigration officials are on hand to escort you to a squalid detention center, where you and others who are now effectively “stateless persons” are detained, potentially indefinitely, until their immigration status is sorted out.
Why might the HSA deny you permission to leave-or enter-the United States? No one knows, because the entire clearance procedure would be an administrative determination made secretly, with no right of appeal. Naturally, the decision would be made without a warrant, without probable cause and without even any particular degree of suspicion. Basically, if the HSA decides it doesn’t like you, you’re a prisoner-either outside, or inside, the United States, whether or not you hold a U.S. passport.
The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized there is a constitutional right to travel internationally. Indeed, it has declared that the right to travel is “a virtually unconditional personal right.” The United States has also signed treaties guaranteeing “freedom of travel.” So if these regulations do go into effect, you can expect a lengthy court battle, both nationally and internationally.
Think this can’t happen? Think again…it’s ALREADY happening. Earlier this year, HSA forbade airlines from transporting an 18-year-old native-born U.S. citizen, back to the United States. The prohibition lasted nearly six months until it was finally lifted a few weeks ago.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are two countries in recent history that didn’t allow their citizens to travel abroad without permission. If these regulations go into effect, you can add the United States to this list.
The U.S. Dollar is kaput. Confidence in the currency is eroding by the day.
A report in The Sydney Morning Herald stated, “Australia’s Treasurer Peter Costello has called on East Asia’s central bankers to ‘telegraph’ their intentions to diversify out of American investments and ensure an ‘orderly adjustment’….Central banks in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong have channeled immense foreign reserves into American government bonds, helping to prop up the US dollar and hold down interest rates,’ said Costello, but ‘the strategy has changed.’”
Indeed, the strategy has changed. The world has come to its senses and is moving away from the green slip of paper that is currently mired in $8.3 trillion of debt.
The central banks now want to reduce their USD reserves while trying to do as little damage to their own economies as possible. That’ll be difficult. If a sell-off ensues, it will start a stampede for the exits.
There’s little hope of an “orderly adjustment” as Costello opines; that’s just false optimism. When the greenback begins listing; things will turn helter-skelter quickly.
In September, we saw early signs that the dollar was in trouble. The trade deficit registered at $70 billion but the Net Foreign Security Purchases (NFSP) came in at a paltry $33 billion. That means that our main trading partners are no longer buying back our debt which puts downward pressure on the greenback. The Fed had two choices; either raise interest rates substantially or let the currency fall. Given the tenuous condition of the housing bubble and the proximity of the midterm elections, the Fed did neither.
A month later, in October, the trade deficit hit $69.9 billion but, then, without warning, a miracle occurred. The Net Foreign Security Purchases skyrocketed to a “historic high” of $116.8 billion; covering both months’ shortfalls almost to the penny.
Coincidence?
Not likely. Either the skittish central banks decided to “stock up” on their dollar-denominated investments or the Federal Reserve (and their banking-buddies) is buying back its own debt to float us through the elections.
This is exactly the kind of hanky-panky that people expected when Greenspan stopped publishing the M-3 last March keeping the rest of us in the dark about what was really going on with the money supply.
Are we supposed to believe that the skeptical central banks suddenly doubled up on their T-Bills while they’re (publicly) moaning about the dollar’s weakness and threatening to diversify?
That’s a stretch.
According to the Wall Street Journal the Chinese Central-bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan stated unequivocally that “We think we’ve got enough.” The Chinese presently have nearly $1 trillion in USD and US Treasuries.
“Enough”?
The United States runs a $200 billion per year trade deficit with China. If they’ve “got enough” we’re dead-ducks. After all, it doesn’t take a sell-off to kill the dollar, just unwillingness on the part of the main players to stop purchasing at the same rate.
Of course, everyone in Washington already knew that doomsday was approaching. That’s the way the system was designed from the very beginning. It’s all part of the madcap scheme to “starve the beast” and transfer the nation’s wealth to a handful of western plutocrats. That’s explains why the Fed and the White House whirred along like two spokes on the same wheel; every policy calculated to thrust the country headlong toward disaster.
The administration never created a funding mechanism for the $400 million tax cuts or for the 35% expansion of the Federal government.
Defense spending increased by leaps and bounds as did the “no-bid” contracts for friends of the Bush clan. At the same time, interest rates were lowered to rock-bottom to put as much money as possible into the hands of people who couldn’t meet the traditional criteria for a mortgage. And, if gluttonous waste, reckless overspending and “Mickey
Mouse” loans were not enough; the Fed capped it off by doubling the money supply in 7 years; a surefire prescription for hyper-inflation.
So, which one of these policies was not deliberate?
The financial crisis that we now face was created by design. It is intended to destroy the labor movement, crush the middle class, quash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, reduce our foreign debt by 50 or 60%, force a restructuring of America’s debt, privatize all public assets and resources, and create a new regime of austerity measures which will divert more wealth to the banking and corporate establishments.
The avatars of neoliberalism invariably use crooked politicians to spawn enormous “unsustainable” debt so that the nations’ riches can be transferred to ruling elites. It works the same everywhere. It’s a form of corporate colonization, only this time the victim is the good old USA.
“The Phase of Impact”
According to Richard Daughty in his prescient article “The Phase of Impact” the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept have already manned the battle-stations. Here’s an excerpt:
“Mr. Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, is, by virtue of his ascension to the throne, now the head of the shadowy President’s Working Group of Financial Markets (which was created by Presidential Order 12631) and he is insisting that they meet more often, namely every 6 weeks!
This whole Working Group thing was originally set up as a fallback, ad-hoc, if-then defense to deal with possible economic emergencies, but now they are routinely meeting every 6 weeks. He has even ordered Jim Wilkinson, his chief of staff, to ‘oversee the creation of a Treasury Command Center to track markets world-wide and serve as an operations base in a crisis”! (Wall Street Journal) World-wide!! The American government is moving to take control of the world-wide economy as the result of an anticipated crisis? Yikes!”
Daughty goes on to say: “So a lot of the hubbub is obviously being caused by some approaching upheaval, perhaps reflected in something sent to me by Phil S., which is the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin No8 which reminded us that last May they predicted that the economy would have a ‘phase of acceleration’ that would begin in June, and it “would be spread out over a period of a maximum of 6 months’, which it subsequently did. They said then, and are saying again now, that a ‘phase of impact will begin in November 2006′, and that this impact phase would be the ‘explosive phase of the crisis’.
This ‘phase of impact’ that is due to begin momentarily is, they explain, ‘a period when a series of brutal crises starts affecting by contamination the total system. This explosive phase of the crisis, which will last 6 months to one year, will affect directly and very strongly financial players and markets, the owners of investment schemes with fixed incomes in dollars, pension funds and the strategic relations between the United States on the one side, and Europe and Asia on the other.” (Richard Daughty; “The Phase of Impact” Kitco.com)
Predictions, of course, are rarely reliable and Daughty’s scenario may be a bit too apocalyptic for many. But if we accept the premise that the tax cuts, the expansion of the federal government, the doubling of the money supply, and the $10 trillion that was sluiced into the housing bubble were not merely “honest mistakes” made by “supply side” enthusiasts; then we must assume that this is all part of a loony plan to demolish the economic foundation-blocks of the current system and remake society from the ground up.
Domestically, that plan appears to involve the activation of the police state.
In the last few weeks the Bush administration has passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which allows the president to arrest and torture whomever he chooses without charging him with a crime.
Also, unbeknownst to most Americans, Bush signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, will allow the president to unilaterally declare martial law. By changing The Insurrection Act, Bush has essentially overturned the Posse Comitatus Act which bars the president from deploying troops with the United States. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 (as it is called) also allows Bush to take control of the National Guard which has always been under the purview of the state governors. Bush now has absolute power over all armed troops within the country, a state of affairs which the constitution purposely tried to prevent. The administration’s dream of militarizing the country under the sole authority of the executive has now been achieved although the public still has no idea that a coup that has taken place.
Internationally, the falling dollar means that America’s debt will be reduced proportionate to the percentage-loss of the dollar in relation to other currencies. This is a great deal for the U.S. First the Fed prints fiat money to buy valuable resources and manufactured goods and then it nabs a discount by depreciating its currency. It’s a “win-win” situation for Washington, although it will undoubtedlycheat unwitting foreign-creditors out of their hard-earned profits. It’s doubtful that their interests will weigh very heavily on the money-lenders at the US Treasury or the Federal Reserve.
The dollar faces a second crisis at home which is bound to play out throughout 2007. The $10 trillion dollar housing bubble is quickly losing air causing a precipitous drop in GDP. The housing industry is seeing its steepest decline in 30 years and home equity is beginning to shrivel. Housing has been the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak economic landscape. With the housing market slowing down and prices decreasing, the $600 billion of consumer spending which was extracted in 2005 from home equity will quickly evaporate triggering an overall slowdown in the economy. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)
By the Fed’s own calculations; “The total amount of residential housing wealth in the US just about doubled between 1999 and 2006 up from $10.4 trillion to $20.4 trillion. (”Times Online”) If these figures are accurate than we can assume that much of America’s “perceived” growth has been nothing more than the expansion of debt. In fact, that seems to be the case. Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, 3 million manufacturing jobs have been outsourced, savings have shrunk to below 0%, and personal debt is soaring. We have become an “asset-based” society and when the principle asset begins to loose its value, we are in deep trouble. As housing prices continue to decline through 2007 we can expect a full-blown recession. If energy prices rear their ugly head again, (were they lowered for the elections?) it will just be that much worse.
So, how will recession affect the dollar? Capital has no loyalties. It follows the markets. When America’s bustling consumer market stalls, we’ll undergo capital flight just like everywhere else. The 3 million lost manufacturing jobs, the 200,000 lost high-paying high-tech jobs, the tax incentives for major corporations doing business outside the country; all signal that corporate America has already loaded the boats and is headed for more promising markets in Asia and Europe. A sluggish consumer market could further weaken the dollar and force Americans to begin saving again but, (and here’s the surprising part) the decision-makers at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept don’t really care if the face-value of the greenback goes down anyway.
What really matters is that the dollar retains its position as the world’s reserve currency. That allows the Federal Reserve to continue to print the money, set the interest rates, and control the global economic system. The dollar presently accounts for 66% of foreign currency reserves in central banks across the globe, an increase of nearly 10% in one decade alone. The dollar has become the international currency, a de-facto monopoly. This is thegoal of the globalists and the American ruling elite who dream of one system, the dollar-system;with usrunning it.
So, how will this cadre of plutocrats coerce the other nations to continue to use the dollar while it plummets from its perch?
Oil.
As long as oil is denominated in dollars, the central banks will be forced to stockpile American scrip regardless of its value. It’s no different than holding a gun to someone’s head. They will use our debt-plagued greenbacks or their cars and trucks will sputter, their tractors and factories will wheeze, and their economies will grind to a halt. It’s just that simple.
America cannot maintain its superpower status unless it continues to control the global economic system. That means the linkage between the dollar and oil must be preserved. The Bush troupe sees this as an existential issue upon which the future of America’s ruling class depends. By 2020, 60% of the world’s oil will come from the Middle East. Bush will do everything in his power to control the resources of the Caspian Basin, thereby expanding US dollar-hegemony and paving the way for a new American century.
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by Mike Whitney
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