'Fight Smart' Update - 17 April 2005

Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE

Bush Presidential 'Victory'
New Academic Report Raises Spectre Of
US Electronic Voting Fraud
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATBinLadenVVotingmachines2.htm
'Bin Laden And The Voting Machines' Revisited
The Post-Election Evidence

"We in the United States are not a banana republic"
Tereza Heinz Kerry, Seattle, 5 March 2005

"The wife of last year's democrat presidential candidate John Kerry says the United States presidential election could have been computer hacked.
Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush's victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes. She said two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States, and that it is very easy to hack into the mother machines. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that Mrs Heinz Kerry was urging Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, and reminded the public that the United States was not a banana republic."
New claims US election 'hacked'
Australian Associated Press, 10 March 2005

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday... The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate. The report also called into question new voting machine technologies. 'All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,' the report concludes."
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, 1 April 2005

"Last month, experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct's results by 100,000 votes without leaving a trace. More than 40 million votes in 30 states were cast on such computer systems....."
Global Eye
Moscow Times, 8 April 2005

"Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II. Bush's erosion of support among independents in particular has helped bring his overall approval rating down to 45 percent. ....
Bush's Poll Numbers Worst on Record
Washington Post, 11 April 2005

"Although 45 percent of Americans polled say they support George Bush, five months ago candidate George Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. In five months, then, millions of Americans have moved from voting for George Bush to not supporting him. Who are these Americans?"
Americans Increasingly Reject Bush
Intervention Magazine, 10 April 2005

The Inauguration Of President George W Bush 20 January 2005 'President Bush gives a thumbs-up to Chief Justice William Rehnquist' Photo - TIME magazine, European Print Edition p 38/39, 31 January 2005 'Celebration And Dissent'

"The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance. Edison/Mitofsky disavowed the results of their own poll, saying that the data cannot be construed as evidence that the official vote count was corrupted, and hypothesized that Kerry voters were more amenable to completing the poll questionnaire than Bush voters.  However, Edison/Mitofsky's own exit poll data does not support their theory that a higher exit poll response rate by Kerry voters accounted for the discrepancies between the exit polls and the presidential election results. Using Edison/Mitofsky’s data tables we demonstrate that the 'reluctant Bush responder' hypothesis is implausible because it is inconsistent with the combination of high response rates and high discrepancy rates among the precincts with the highest percentage for Bush." Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Graph from Summary Report Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Statistical Analysis Showing High Difference Between Official Election Results And Exit Polls Where Votes Counted By Machine In 2004 Presidential Election (compared with low difference where hand counted paper ballots used) WPE = 'Within Precinct Error' Table 7: Median WPE by voting equipment Main Report (p18) "Hand counted paper ballots were used primarily in rural districts .... Precincts with paper ballots, used primarily in rural precincts, showed a median WPE of –0.9, consistent with chance, while all other technologies were associated with unexplained high WPE discrepancies between election and exit poll results...." Main Report (p18)

"[Before the election] On the CNBC TV show 'Topic A With Tina Brown,' several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real 'counting' is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a 'central tabulator' machine. That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. 'In a voting system,' Harris explained to Dean on national television, 'you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?' Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. 'What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer.'  'So,' Dean said, 'anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?' Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. 'This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees,' she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software....[Harris then demonstrated how to hack the program]. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'   On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said... Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide....So far, the only national 'mainstream' media to come close to this story was [MSNBC's] Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed...." Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked Common Dreams, 6 November 2004

"The recent and ongoing proliferation of sophisticated computerized vote recording and tallying equipment, much of it unverifiable and hence 'faith-based', dramatically augments the opportunities for wholesale and outcome-determinative distortions of the vote counting process. That the lion's share of this equipment is developed, provided, and serviced by partisan private corporations only amplifies these serious concerns. The fact that, in the 2004 election, all voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party certainly warrants further inquiry. The absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unblinking investigation."
Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005
(Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities)

'Bin Laden And The Voting Machines' Revisited - You Were Warned

Two days before the US 2004 Presidential election 'Fight Smart' issued a bulletin entitled 'Bin Laden and The Voting Machines'. It questioned which would be the bigger influence on the outcome of the election - the sudden appearance of a video tape of Osama Bin Laden verbally attacking America just days before voting, or the much feared domestic manipulation of electronic voting machines to fraudulently skew the official result.

Senator John Kerry, the loser in the election contest, has since gone on record stating that he thinks his defeat was down to the Bin Laden tape. At the end of January Kerry told NBC "I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday."

But others are not so sure. And they claim to have tight statistical evidence to support their case, particularly as Kerry was significantly ahead in exit polls on election day itself.

A group of academics working under the auspices of the public interest group 'USCountVotes' has now produced a fresh analysis of exit poll data in the Presidential election. This group comprises mathematicians and statistical analysts at the Universities of Temple, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, Illinois, Notre Dame, Cornell, Case Western Reserve and the Southern Methodist University.

Extracts of their paper dated 31 March are provided below. The bottom line is that significant discrepancies between the official election result and the exit polls were found where machine voting (mechanical, touch screen, punch cards, and optical scan) was used, whereas the tallied vote fell within the margin of error for exit polls where hand counted (i.e. not scanned) paper ballots were used. This analysis is based on exit poll data provided by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International who were on contract with major national press and TV news services, operating collectively as the National Election Pool for the election.

At the time of the release of the Bin Laden tape there was much debate about its significance. Did it help or hinder Bush? Some even wondered whether the tape was a fake given that we now live in the era of sophisticated digital video editing (remember how Oliver Read still featured in scenes of 'Gladiator' even after the actor had died of a heart attack part way through filming?).

Meanwhile it is worth noting that in American elections even mechanical machine votes and most paper ballots (via optical scanners) are ultimately counted electronically by programmed tabulator computers. The answer they give is, of course, ultimately determined by how those computers function.

According to a report 6 November 2004 by the Common Dreams alternative news web service: "[Before the election] On the CNBC TV show 'Topic A With Tina Brown,' several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real 'counting' is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a 'central tabulator' machine. That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. 'In a voting system,' Harris explained to Dean on national television, 'you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?' Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. 'What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer.'  'So,' Dean said, 'anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?' Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. 'This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees,' she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software....[Harris then demonstrated how to hack the program]. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'   On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said... Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide...."

But Harris has not left it there. According a report on her web site 8 March 2005 "In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked. This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.... The hack ..... was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person. This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for their investigation."

So if electronic voting fraud were to have taken place during the US Presidential election (and from the work now emerging out of several university departments following the election there is clearly a prima facie case to be answered here), then the principal significance of the Bin Laden tape may have been rather different to that proffered by Kerry when attempting to explain his surprise defeat to NBC.

In those circumstances the main impact of the tape (with which Kerry's own response is not incompatible) would have been to divert attention away from the more serious issue voiced by many prior to polling day - namely, the spectre of voting machine fraud. As 'Fight Smart' put it 31 October "If an attempt to tamper with electronic votes in key swing states were to be made on Tuesday then an 'intelligent' fraud would, of course, be to fix the numbers in such a way that the result was sufficiently close to look plausible. The media punditry would probably still be too diverted discussing the impact of the sudden arrival of Bin Laden on the election scene to notice in any case."

'Hypothetically' speaking, therefore, the arrival of such a tape close to polling could deliver a most fortuitous distraction of public attention serving to the clear benefit of anyone planning to perpetrate a voting fraud on behalf of the eventual 'victor', especially in an otherwise close race. And certainly the presumed overriding importance of the October 2004 Bin Laden tape tipping the result of the election in Bush's favour is now apparently taken as read by Senator Kerry himself.

Yet, this is despite the as yet unexplained awkward contradiction of the exit polls on voting day itself, a remarkable discrepancy about which the Senator has made little public comment (Kerry says he was sliding in opinion polls just before voting, but exit polls taken directly from those who have actually voted are normally regarded as more reliable, and so far Kerry seems to have remained silent on this).

By contrast, however, Kerry's more outspoken wife went on public record in March stating that she thinks the election may have been electronically hacked. According to a piece entitled 'New claims US election hacked' published by the Australian Associated Press 10 March "The wife of last year's democrat presidential candidate John Kerry says the United States presidential election could have been computer hacked. Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush's victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes. She said two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States, and that it is very easy to hack into the mother machines. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that Mrs Heinz Kerry was urging Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, and reminded the public that the United States was not a banana republic."

Indeed, given the post-election statistical work completed to date by several university departments, outstanding questions over the potential abuse of machine vote counting in the 2004 election remain more than of just hypothetical interest.

So where have the mainstream media been through all of this? Have you seen them reporting on the latest collaborative research organised under the auspices of 'USCountVote' and involving academics from nine US Universities?

Well, most likely not (unless perhaps you happen to be a keen reader of the English language press in Cuba). But at least the Guardian in Britain ran a rare post-US election piece on 2 February written by former Blair Minister, Michael Meacher, highlighting some of the scope for computer based voting fraud during the 2004 contest for the White House - and indeed for future elections (in a separate article in the Independent 5 April Meacher also reports on apparently successful US efforts to rig the Iraqi elections by covertly reducing the Shia vote using more conventional methods of ballot fraud).

However, unless people look up and start paying attention to such warnings then we can expect to kiss further goodbye to accountable government all too soon. Indeed, the 'detention without trial' Blair Government in Britain is already contemplating following America's lead with the possible introduction of electronic voting sometime after 2006, and doubtless other countries will then follow on too (Blair's Labour party has already had court convictions made against members who have been involved in postal-ballot rigging, with such actions being urged in a national Labour party document according to a report in the London Times 10 December 2004).

Unless, that is, there is a large scale and vigorous public revolt to nip these corrosive developments in the bud just in the nick of time. With Anglo-American sponsored vote fraud now apparently widespread in countries such as the USA, Britain and Iraq, a global protest on this subject is being organised for May Day 2005 (click here if you wish to participate).

Experience has shown that blatant political deception in Britain and America is not a rare occurrence. It is endemic.

The recent exposure of the British government's al Qaeda 'ricin' plot claim as bogus is simply one more outrageous revelation in the long stream of Anglo-American fraud used to manipulate the public will into supporting a malicious transatlantic agenda.

This claim was used as part of Colin Powell's WMD case at the UN Security Council to promote international backing for an unprovoked attack against Iraq, and by Tony Blair to frighten the British public in the run up to the crucial parliamentary vote on the proposed war. According to the Sunday Herald 17 April the British government's Porton Down laboratory has effectively acknowledged that ricin is in fact unsuitable for use as a WMD in any case as one of its own documents presented at the case trial stated that there is "no reliable scientific evidence … that suggests ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin".

Let us be clear about this.

As demonstrated during the last few days by the Guardian, Independent, and Sunday Herald in the case of the ricin scam (in stark contrast other media such as the Telegraph, and the Times which managed to produce the astonishingly extravagant front page headline "The al-qaeda plot to poison Britain" from the same story, even though the charge of "conspiracy to commit acts of Islamist terrorism by killing innocent civilians" against the principal accused had been dropped), this agenda is ruthlessly promoted on the back of scaremonging claims known full well by parts of the authorities to be false or exaggerated (for more on how public opinion is manipulated through the placement of false information in the press by the intelligence services see the allegations concerning 'Operation Mass Appeal' by Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and US marine intelligence officer).

We have been somewhere like this before.

Remember that tyranny rose to absolute power in Europe in the middle of the last century through the manipulative use of the democratic process, and that the German public who were sucked into that oppressive abuse of power (goaded by Hitler's own propagandised version of today's 'war against terrorism' - in his case, against Jews, Poles, Communists and other groups claimed by him to be a threat to Germany's national security, but in reality used as whipping posts to justify territorial expansion of the Reich) hardly noticed what had really been going on until it was too late.

But then, like some of the most destructive political leaders of our own time, their leader claimed that God was on his side and even the Churches were forced to submit.

'Gott Mit Uns'.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

Today Resistance Is Not Impossible - Yet

Click Here For May Day World Wide Protest Details

Propaganda 'Mit Uns'

"It was a weapon of mass destruction, a warning that we all needed to be 'vigilant and alert'. Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it was presented as the final proof that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qa'ida. Anyone wanting to exploit the politics of fear could scarcely conjure up anything more potent than the news that a suspected terrorist cell had been making ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known to man, in a north London flat. But there was no ricin - a fact suppressed for more than two years. There was no terrorist cell, just one deluded and dangerous man who killed a police officer during a bungled immigration raid....   Last week at the Old Bailey, the Algerian was convicted and sentenced to 17 years for 'conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by the use of poisons and/or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury'. Four other alleged co-conspirators were acquitted, and charges against four lesser figures, whose trial was due to start tomorrow, were dropped. Yet the authorities remained undaunted. Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner in charge of anti-terrorism, said a 'real and deadly threat' had been averted, adding that it would be hard to overestimate 'the fear and disruption this plot could have caused across the country'. His chief, Sir Ian Blair, said it supported the argument for compulsory identity cards, echoing the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. Mr Clarke's immediate predecessor, David Blunkett, claimed that the case showed the need for more anti-terrorism laws... A terrorism trial which was spun from start to finish, abetted by many senior elements of the security establishment and much hysterical coverage in the media, is still being manipulated, regardless of the evidence in court. The 'ricin plot' was used before the Iraq war by Tony Blair as evidence of the danger from weapons of mass destruction, and by Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, before the UN Security Council as proof that Iraq was aiding al-Qa'ida terrorism. Linked to an equally illusory 'poison gas' threat to the London Underground, it was kept alive throughout a series of genuine attacks in places such as Istanbul and Madrid as a reminder that Britain too was a target.... Far from being an al-Qa'ida mastermind dispatched by Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants to destroy the British way of life, Bourgass emerges as an embittered loner who alarmed even other members of the marginal world he inhabited, one of illegal immigrants whose petty criminality was constrained by their poverty and poor English.... Four of the five main alleged conspirators were cleared last week, and the jury refused to convict Bourgass, the acknowledged owner of the incriminating bedsit lab, of the most serious charge of all: conspiracy to commit acts of Islamist terrorism by killing innocent civilians. But in January 2003 Britain and the US were also on the verge of war on Iraq, and the facts of the case were soon subordinated to political necessity. Even if ricin had been produced - and expert evidence at the Old Bailey was that the 'recipes' Bourgass had were all but useless - it is not by any description a weapon of mass destruction. Quite the opposite: it is effective only as a means of individual assassination, as demonstrated by the Bulgarian secret service, which used ricin to kill the dissident Georgi Markov on the streets of London in 1978....  But as we now know, there was no ricin in any case. Professor Alistair Hay, one of Britain's foremost authorities on toxins, said Bourgass's attempts to construct toxic weapons from his small supplies of ingredients and ramshackle 'laboratory' were 'incredibly amateurish and unlikely to succeed'. He was scathing about Meguerba's allegations that ricin would be smeared on door handles. Ricin, he said, had to be injected straight into a victim to be a reliable weapon. Swallowing ricin could kill, but was a thousand times less effective. Simply touching crudely made ricin was even less likely to kill. His expert report was so damning that the prosecution dropped Meguerba's claims.... More sinister, however, was the expert's discovery when he looked through the analysis of the seized material by the Porton Down chemical weapons laboratories in Wiltshire. On 7 January 2003 - the same day that two cabinet ministers claimed ricin had been found in north London - Porton scientists had realised there was no ricin there at all. Their first results at the flat had been a 'false positive'. What happened to that profoundly important discovery is still the subject of intense controversy. Porton officials were unable to tell Professor Hay when they told the police or Home Office. The Old Bailey heard claims that an overly cautious Porton Down official had delayed passing the information on. Defence lawyers, however, believe ministers knew at an early stage that the claimed ricin find was wrong. Gareth Peirce, the human rights lawyer who acted for three of the acquitted men, claims that as ministers built up the fear of terrorist attack on Britain and prepared the public for the invasion of Iraq, the Government twice allowed largely unfounded scare stories to dominate the headlines - the ricin conspiracy and the alleged 'poison gas' attack on the London Underground. The alleged plot to target the Tube first broke with a sensational story in The Sunday Times, which claimed in November 2002 that the intelligence services and police had thwarted a major al-Qa'ida plot to gas the Underground. The paper claimed the alleged plotters would appear in court the next day, leading to a frenzy of press reports citing MI5 and police sources claiming a 'terrorist attack had been nipped in the bud'. In fact, no such plot had been discovered. Three men were actually charged with using false passports. Two have since pleaded guilty, under ordinary criminal laws, to passport offences. One was an alleged al-Qa'ida ringleader, Rabah Kadre, the then librarian at Finsbury Park Mosque, where many of the alleged ricin conspirators worshipped. According to Ms Peirce, the ricin plot was similarly exploited for political ends.... Ms Peirce is scathing about the political use made of the ricin 'plot', saying: 'We had a find in a London flat of something that could be poison, with a number of lists or recipes. A very early announcement was made that ricin had been found. From then on, people became aware of a poison they'd never heard of before, and that then created a major alarm - something on which the Prime Minister felt impelled to speak that very evening. 'Yet within 48 hours, Porton Down knew that ricin had not been found. If enormous public concern and fear has been generated, then the responsibility clearly of the Government is to reassure people that it was in fact a false alarm, that no poisons were found. But at no stage has any public correction been made.'..."
Ricin: The plot that never was
Independent, 17 April 2005

"It can now be revealed that months earlier, and behind the scenes, the government had seen its claims that the group was a major terrorist cell with the capability of launching a ricin terror attack begin to disintegrate. Using the notes, written by Bourgass, found at the Wood Green address, scientists at Porton Down attempted to replicate the ricin recipe. They found that by copying his recipe the active ricin naturally contained in castor beans would actually be destroyed. It was also found that the amount of castor beans mentioned in Bourgass’s recipes – five grams – would constitute one lethal dose, but only if injected. It would not be sufficient to kill if eaten. In a disclosure that appears at odds with the belief that Bourgass’s plan to smear door handles with ricin was a major terror threat, Paul Rice, group leader for medicine and toxicology at Porton Down, wrote in a document revealed at the trial that there was 'no reliable scientific evidence … that suggests ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin'.... In another astonishing revelation, while the government and police allowed speculation to persist that ricin had been found in the flat and was to be used in a terror attack, it has emerged that on January 7 – the day of Veness’s statement – Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at Porton Down, completed lab tests which confirmed that the ricin finding was a false positive. He wrote: 'Subsequent confirmatory tests on the material from the pestle and mortar did not detect the presence of ricin. It is my opinion therefore that toxins are not detectable in the pestle and mortar.' Despite this, on February 3, 2003, Tony Blair told the Commons: 'Iraq is not the only country posing a risk in respect of WMDs. Over the past few weeks, we have seen powerful evidence of the continuing terrorist threats; the suspected ricin plot in London and Manchester …'.....Following the trial on Wednesday, Labour and the police have been keen to paint the conviction of Bourgass as a triumph. In a statement, the Metropolitan Police’s anti- terror chief Peter Clarke said a 'real and deadly threat' had been averted. 'The impact on the public, if he [Bourgass] had succeeded in what he wanted to do, is incalculable.' David Blunkett, who was home secretary at the time of the arrests, said: 'We were very close indeed to disaster. We were actually much calmer and more reassuring to the public than we felt ourselves.' However, Tony Blair and anti-terror police are now facing uncomfortable questions about whether the conviction of Bourgass really represents a major success for the so-called war on terror. As the facts emerge, a growing number of people believe that the case reveals how a criminal investigation was exploited for political purposes by the UK and US governments in order to make their case for war against Iraq. Some also suggest that the case was used to justify the argument for tighter restrictions on civil liberties, such as the introduction of control orders or ID cards.”
A pestle and mortar and castor beans ... tools of a terror plot or an excuse for the government to ramp up public paranoia?
Sunday Herald, 17 April 2005

Listen To Gareth Pierce Being Interviewed On The BBC Today Programme - Click Here

Guardian - The ricin ring that never was - Click Here
Washington Post - London ricin: finding called false positive - Click Here
Guardian - Doubts grow over al-Qaida link in ricin plot - Click Here
Guardian - Home Office says sorry to suspects for ricin blunder - Click Here

Overview
Anglo-American Election Fraud

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday... The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate. The report also called into question new voting machine technologies. 'All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,' the report concludes."
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, 1 April 2005

The Inauguration Of President George W Bush 20 January 2005

'President Bush gives a thumbs-up to Chief Justice William Rehnquist' Photo - TIME magazine, European Print Edition p 38/39, 31 January 2005 'Celebration And Dissent' How Did This Unpopular President Win The US Election? "President Bush's approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president since World War II at this point in his second term, the Gallup Organization reported today. 'All other presidents who were re-elected to a second term had approval ratings well above 50% in the March following their re-election,' Gallup reported.  Bush's current rating is 45%. The next lowest was Reagan with 56% in March 1985." Gallup: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Ever for 2nd-Term Prez at this Point Editor And Publisher, 5 April 2005 "Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II. Bush's erosion of support among independents in particular has helped bring his overall approval rating down to 45 percent. Fort-nine percent disapprove of his performance...True enough, Bush's numbers weren't all that high to begin with. In the last Gallup poll before the election, he was at 48 percent approval to 47 percent disapproval -- yet he still won ...." Bush's Poll Numbers Worst on Record Washington Post, 11 April 2005 "The next time one of your smartypants liberal friends says to you, `Well, he didn't have a mandate,' you tell him of this delicious fact: This president got a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate for president since 1964." Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist Rove to GOP: Don't Grow 'Tired or Timid' Associated Press, 17 February 2005 "Although 45 percent of Americans polled say they support George Bush, five months ago candidate George Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. In five months, then, millions of Americans have moved from voting for George Bush to not supporting him. Who are these Americans?" Americans Increasingly Reject Bush Intervention Magazine, 10 April 2005 "The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance." Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 "In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked. This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.... The hack ..... was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person. This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for their investigation." Investigation Update (Submitted to members of the House Judiciary Committee on Mar. 4 and Mar. 8.) Blackbox Voting, 8 March 2005

Hey George, Relax, We All Know That Systematic Party-Sponsored Vote Fraud Doesn't Happen In Anglo-American Controled Democracies - Now Does It?
No Tony, It Sure Doesn't

'It Can't Happen Here' - UK

"Investigations by The Times into all-postal voting in June found ..... A national Labour Party document [which] urged activists to set up bogus ballot boxes outside traditional polling stations in all-postal-voting areas."
Test case on future of postal voting examines organised electoral fraud
London Times, 10 December 2004

".....the Tories will tomorrow attempt to capitalise on Labour embarrassment over fraud claims by issuing a four-point action plan for ballot reform. In addition to introducing independent observers, they would scrap Labour's plans for all-postal ballots and electronic voting..... The police are currently investigating allegations of postal vote fraud during the 2004 local and European elections in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Surrey."
Poll monitors to combat election fraud
The Observer, 3 April 2005

"The Labour Party deliberately rigged elections to Britain’s biggest local council because it feared losing power in the face of public opposition to the Iraq war, a judge decided yesterday. The postal voting system introduced by Tony Blair’s Government without any safeguards against cheating was responsible for 'electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic', he said.  Opposition parties immediately called for urgent changes such as individual registration to 'restore confidence in the electoral system'.... The Labour Party machine in Birmingham was condemned for trying to stop the trial and pre-judge the result."
Up to 3,000 people had ballot papers stolen
London Times, 5 April 2005

"The postal voting system was condemned as wide open to fraud by the second judge in a week as a former Labour councillor was jailed yesterday for stealing 233 people’s votes....... Judge Peter Openshaw said that he had no precedent for deciding punishment because election fraud on such a scale had been unknown in Britain for 100 years.  Judge Openshaw, the Recorder of Preston, identified what he called obvious vulnerabilities in the system just days after an election commissioner in Birmingham blamed postal voting for fraud that would 'disgrace a banana republic'. The Director of Public Prosecutions is studying the commissioner’s report on six Birmingham Labour councillors who stole 3,000 votes. Yesterday’s case prompted calls for emergency measures to reform postal voting. Both cases this week have exposed Labour Party involvent in fraud.... "
Councillor jailed for vote fraud
London Times, 9 April 2005

"..... the [British] government remains keen on electronic voting and is aiming at 'an e-enabled election some time after 2006'. Will this raise turnout or simply increase the risk of fraud? Several pilots have been held. In 2003, six local authorities electronically counted ballot papers where votes had also been cast electronically. Surprisingly, there has been no manual checking of the e-counting results. However, a full-blown test run of e-voting has been carried out elsewhere, with very instructive results. It shows that e-voting is neither secure nor tamper-proof, and allegations are surfacing that it may have affected the result. This dry run was the recent US presidential election. ... According to Harris, a manipulation technique she found in Diebold's AccuVote central vote tabulator is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set within its software. 'By entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes,' she has said. And she has demonstrated this live on television. Her conclusion is: 'You can easily edit the election.'.... We must be extremely cautious of the surge towards electronic voting. Before importing US voting systems into Britain, any software secrets in the machine technology must be made transparent. Software must be properly certified, and there must be paper trails."
Michael Meacher - Former Blair Minister
Political machinations
The government is keen to deploy e-voting despite evidence of ballot rigging
Guardian, 2 February 2005

'It Can't Happen Here' - IRAQ

"The scene is now set for a prolonged power struggle between the US and the Shia majority. Having been deprived for more than 500 years of the opportunity to govern Iraq, the Shias, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are clearly now determined to exert their influence.In the face of this risk of a clerical-backed alliance of Shia Islamists in collaboration with Iran, the US has not been idle. Time magazine (27 September 2004) reported before the elections on a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favoured by Washington. It reported US officials as saying that the idea was to help such candidates, but 'not necessarily' to go so far as to rig the elections. In the event, the United Iraqi Alliance of mainly Shia Islamist parties won only 48 per cent of the total vote, well below their share of the population. Interestingly, Reuters (13 February) reported a few hours before the election results were officially announced that 'the United Iraqi Alliance said today it had been told by Iraq's Electoral Commission that it had won around 60 per cent of the vote in the country's election'. This was later confirmed by the former US chief Unscom weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who announced to a packed meeting in Washington state on 19 February that the United Iraqi Alliance actually gained 56 per cent of the vote, and that 'an official involved in the manipulation was the source'. The significance of this voting manoeuvre is revealed in a Washington Post report (14 February): 'A senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 per cent vote won by the Shia slate deprives it of an outright majority. 'If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation'."
Michael Meacher: America is usurping the democratic will in Iraq
Independent, 5 April 2005

"Well-placed sources in Iraq who were in a position to know have told me that the actual Shi'a vote was 56 percent. American intervention, in the form of a 'secret vote count' conducted behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny, produced the Feb. 14 result. The lowering of the Shi'a vote re-engineered the post-election political landscape in Iraq dramatically. The goal of the U.S., in doing this, is either to guarantee the adoption of the U.S.-drafted interim constitution, or make sure that there are not enough votes to adopt any Shi'a re-write. If the U.S.-drafted Iraqi constitution prevails, the Bush administration would be comfortable with the secular nature of any Iraqi government it produces. If it fails, then the Bush administration would much rather continue to occupy Iraq under the current U.S.-written laws, than allow for the creation of a pro-Iranian theocracy. In any event, the Shi'a stand to lose. Whether this re-engineering will succeed in the long run has yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that many senior Shi'a know the real results that occurred on Jan. 30, and will not walk away from what they believe is their rightful destiny when it comes to governing of Iraq: a Shi'a controlled state, operating in accordance with Shar'ia law."
Scott Ritter - Hijacking Democracy in Iraq
AlterNet, 23 March 2005

'It Can't Happen Here' - US

"After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many more terminals are on the way. Unforunately, the machines have 'a fatal disadvantage,' says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who’s sponsoring legislation on the issue. 'They’re unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded.' After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices—but there’s no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job. It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can’t be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold’s source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. 'Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,' he says.... Suspicions run even higher when people learn that some of those in charge of voting technology are themselves partisan. Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fund-raiser for the Bush re-election campaign who recently wrote to contributors that he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.'”
Black Box Voting Blues
Newsweek, 3 November 2004

"Democracy rests on the public accepting the results of elections. But why should they? In general, trustworthiness stems from accountability. The ability to independently check the performance of a person, institution, or system allows errors to be caught and corrected, and, more importantly, deters errors. Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polling place there is no way anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended. This system lacks accountability. David Dill is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the author of a 'Resolution on Electronic Voting' advocating that every voting system should have a voter-verifiable audit trail. In this talk he discusses some principles, the basic technical issues with electronic voting, and some of the controversy surrounding the topic. A panel discussion by a group of experts follows the talk. This is the inaugural event in Rice Univerity's Technology, Society and Public Policy Lecture Series."
The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems
Rice University Webcast Archive, 25 February 2005

"On the substance, this bill - the subject of so much concern - falls for short of fixing what is wrong with our democracy....Will it help the inner-city voter in Franklin County, Ohio who waited ten hours in the pouring rain, while suburban voters in that county had no appreciable wait times?  What will this bill do to correct the problems that occurred in the most recent presidential election?..... I'm afraid it will do nothing to offer an explanation for the numerous machines in Mahoning County that recorded Kerry votes for Bush; the improper purging that took place in Cuyhaoga County; the machine tampering that occurred in Hocking County; or the 99% turnout that took place in Miami County."
Rep. John Conyers, on Bill HR 841
US House of Representatives, 3 March 2005

"It was a spectacular irony - a Republican senator using the word 'fraud' about the presidential election. More spectacular still, he was visiting his condemnation of apparent election manipulation on the incumbent party. And beyond all that, he and others based their conclusions largely on the incredible disparity between the last exit polls and the vote count itself.  Of course, Indiana’s Richard Lugar was talking about the presidential election in the Ukraine. But in so doing, he underscored that once again, the exit polls appear to have fulfilled the time-honored international tradition of the canary in the mine shaft.  If only we could have used them in that way here..... And [exit polls], along with the voting irregularities so thoroughly chronicled on the net (and still just seeping into the mainstream media), created an atmosphere that [national pollster John] Zogby thinks requires broad remedy: 'I think it's in the interests of the nation that we study what happened in this election and widen that, let's study what happened with the exit polls, and let's come out with a definitive conclusions by a blue ribbon panel to restore the legitimacy of this election.' Zogby thinks he knows the steps to take to do that. The first is for those who are raising questions, to keep doing so. 'I can reassure them they’re not crazy for asking. It’s not just those who are far out, it is indeed many respectable, responsible people.' The pollster says he’s heard from thousands of them, asking him to get involved in their various causes and investigations, so many he can’t answer them all. But he used Countdown as his mass e-mail reply. 'I’ll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it’s in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls.' Zogby called for the proverbial blue-ribbon commission into the voting irregularities, and the full release of the exit polling data.... Zogby says he’s at peace with his own Election Night forecast - made not with the Mitofsky or Edison exit polling, but with his own polls. He saw Florida and Ohio both 'trending' towards Kerry, and producing a triple-digit victory for the Democrat..... it was mildly encouraging to see some focus given to this entire topic Tuesday night by my old CNN cohort Aaron Brown. A carefully-worded segment included a laundry list of the problems we’ve been reporting on Countdown for the last three weeks, and compared them to 'the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubbell telescope.'  Brown referenced the UC Berkeley study on the prospect of 130,000 phantom votes in Florida (though he didn’t mention its conclusion that all of them went to President Bush), and even had about fifteen seconds of Blackbox’s Bev Harris and her slog through the computer printout records in Florida. Such as they are."
Keith Olbermann
MSNBC, 24 November 2004

"National pollster John Zogby, with a mixed record of predicting past elections, Tuesday afternoon went out on a limb and projected that Sen. John Kerry would defeat President Bush in the 2004 election. Zogby released his Election Day polling results shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday showing Kerry with 311 electoral votes to Bush's 213. Two-hundred seventy electoral votes are necessary to win the presidency. Zogby said Nevada and Colorado were too close to call. Republican operatives at Bush's planned victory party in Washington dismissed the numbers as inflated in Kerry's favor. Zogby had Kerry winning nearly all of the battleground states, including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Massachusetts senator had big leads in Iowa and Wisconsin, according to Zogby's polls. Earlier in the day, RealClearPolitics.com issued its average of various polls and showed that Bush was leading Kerry in the Electoral College vote, 227 to 203, with seven states too close to call. Those seven states were Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and New Mexico".
CNSNews, 2 November 2004
(Saved text - article web link no longer traceable)

"Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country, even while e-vote watchdogs prepared to file suits challenging the results derived from the controversial machines..... Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.... Many of the problems with electronic voting — whether accidental or intentional — may not be known until well after Tuesday, if at all. Most of the ATM-style machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. The organization recommended that voters choosing to use touchscreen voting methods be sure to double-check the summary screen to confirm that their votes had been properly registered. BlackBoxVoting.org, the site organized by e-voting activist Bev Harris, announced early Wednesday that it plans to conduct what the site describes as the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history, requesting internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships using electronic voting machines".
E-voting irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure
USA Today, 3 November 2004

Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005

Statistical Analysis Showing High Difference Between
Official Election Results And Exit Polls Where Votes
Counted By Machine In 2004 Presidential Election
(compared with low difference where paper ballots used)
WPE = 'Within Precinct Error'
Table 7: Median WPE by voting equipment
Main Report


Graph from Summary Report
Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005

Latest 2004 US Presidential Election Result Research From Academic Consortium

Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
http://exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

March 31, 2005

Press Contact: Bruce O'Dell, USCountVotes, Vice President bruce@uscountvotes.org

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky1 consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance.

These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,2403. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance. Edison/Mitofsky disavowed the results of their own poll, saying that the data cannot be construed as evidence that the official vote count was corrupted, and hypothesized that Kerry voters were more amenable to completing the poll questionnaire than Bush voters.

However, Edison/Mitofsky's own exit poll data does not support their theory that a higher exit poll response rate by Kerry voters accounted for the discrepancies between the exit polls and the presidential election results. Using Edison/Mitofsky’s data tables we demonstrate that the “reluctant Bush responder” hypothesis is implausible because it is inconsistent with the combination of high response rates and high discrepancy rates among the precincts with the highest percentage for Bush.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:

· voting machine shortages
· ballots counted and recounted in secret
· lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots
· touch-screen machines that registered “Bush” when voters pressed “Kerry”
· precincts in which there were more votes recorded than registered voters
· precincts in which the reported participation rate was less than 10%
· high rates of “spoiled” ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded
· a sworn affidavit by a Florida computer programmer who claims he was hired to develop a voting program with a “back door” mechanism to undetectably alter
vote tallies

Did Edison/Mitofsky's January 19th report support their assertion that Bush voters were more reluctant to participate in exit poll surveys than Kerry voters? Did their analysis confirm the “Reluctant Bush Responder” hypothesis?.....

Table 7: Median WPE by voting equipment

.......................................................
Visit USCountVotes Web Site
http://uscountvotes.org/

University of Pennsylvania Research

The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
In The 2004 US Presidential Election
    By Professor Steven F. Freeman
University of Pennsylvania, 14 November 2004
Click here to read the pdf file

"The conventional wisdom going into the election was that three critical states would likely determine who would win the Presidential election - Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.... The odds against all three [exit poll/tallied vote shifts] occurring are 250 million to one."
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
University of Pennsylvania, 14 November 2004

University Of California Research

"Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a 'smoke alarm.' Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.... The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.... 'No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,' said Hout. 'The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
University of California Berkeley, Press Release 18 November 2004

'New Scientist' On Wireless E-voting Machines

"Many of the computer scientists New Scientist spoke to were unaware of the wireless capability of the TSx machine. Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard University, thinks Diebold has not publicised it because of the criticism the company has already received.  She supports legislation currently pending in the US Congress that specifically prohibits the use of wireless communications devices in voting systems. Computer scientists are concerned that new electronic voting machines - already bought by several US states - have been designed to have the capability to transmit vote tallies wirelessly. Critics of e-voting have previously cited uncertified software upgrades or bugs in the programs as problems, but they say the new touchscreen machines' wireless potential poses a novel security threat. The makers of the new machines, Diebold Electronic Voting Systems in Canton, Ohio, point out that none of the AccuVote-TSx machines currently contain the matchbox-sized card required to make a wireless network connection. But, unlike their predecessors, they do have a slot for the card, called a PCMCIA slot. And Diebold spokesperson Mark Radke told New Scientist that wireless capability could be implemented 'if required by the jurisdiction' simply by inserting a card and configuring the machine.... Transmission of voting tallies via a wireless network would enable a central server to collect all the votes from a polling station quickly - currently the memory cards from all the e-voting terminals have to be physically collected. Wireless connection could also allow software to be updated remotely. 'The benefits to election officials would be huge,' admits Doug Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa. But for Jones and other computer scientists contacted by New Scientist, the potential risks outweigh the benefits. Some say wireless communication is too insecure to be trusted with the democratic process. They also point out that simply having the PCMCIA slot means a bogus election official or voter could secretly slip a wireless card into the machine. If this happened and a wireless link was made, it would be very difficult to monitor who was trying to hack the terminal. 'Wireless capability is almost ideally suited for hackers,' says Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 'They no longer have to get physically close to the machines to tamper with them.' Rubin published a report in July 2003 claiming numerous software flaws in Diebold's earlier touch-screen voting machines."
Wireless e-voting machines raise concern
New Scientist, 20 January 2004

Voting The American Way - Electoral Fraud Comes To Britain

"The gravest threat to the integrity of postal voting comes from two pending trials into alleged 'massive organised electoral fraud' in Britain’s biggest
local authority. Across the country yesterday, police said they were still looking into claims of irregularities in the June 10 European and local polls....Birmingham has become the test case for the future of postal voting. Although the city was excluded from the postal-only experiment, the council saw a surge in applications for postal votes from 24,000 to 70,000. The High Court has appointed Richard Mawrey, QC, a deputy judge, as Election Commissioner to examine petitions seeking to overthrow results in Bordesley Green and Aston wards. Two ten-day trials, without juries, will be held in Birmingham from February to March.... After claims of mass forgery in Aston, every application for a postal vote and every ballot is being checked to see if the signatures match..... The petition for Aston alleges: 'Post boxes containing a number of ballots were set alight to invalidate the votes. 'Threats of deportation were made by Labour supporters to first-generation migrants if they did not sign postal vote papers to vote Labour. 'Attempts were made by Labour supporters in Bordesley Green to bribe a postman and he was threatened with having his throat cut,' the petition continues. Labour activists stole postal votes from addresses. Children were paid to collect postal votes that were sticking out of people’s doors.' Investigations by The Times into all-postal voting in June found ..... A national Labour Party document [which] urged activists to set up bogus ballot boxes outside traditional polling stations in all-postal-voting areas."
Test case on future of postal voting examines organised electoral fraud
London Times, 10 December 2004

"The Labour Party was accused yesterday of seeking to delay trials into alleged widespread rigging of postal votes until after the general election to avoid political embarrassment. A judge refused Labour’s request to adjourn England’s first full election court for 30 years into an alleged organised fraud involving thousands of forged postal votes.... The trial comes after widespread allegations of postal fraud and voter intimidation in local elections last year.... The hearings arise from local elections last June, when Labour survived as the largest party on Britain’s biggest council, Birmingham, despite expected hostility in Muslim areas to the Iraq war....."
Labour fails to stall trial on postal vote-rigging claims
London Times, 22 February 2005

"Labour’s electoral reforms, which will result in thousands of extra postal votes in the general election, are being put on trial in Birmingham at the first election court to investigate fraud for 100 years..... Fraught scenes after the election during the vote-counting at the National Indoor Arena were described. Three boxes allegedly appeared with 1,500 postal votes written in the same blue ink, all for Labour candidates in Bordesley Green ward. Since Labour beat its nearest rivals, the People’s Justice Party, by only 441 votes, the judge said that this incident alone could invalidate the election."
How to fix a postal vote - by trial judge
London Times, 23 February 2005

".....the Tories will tomorrow attempt to capitalise on Labour embarrassment over fraud claims by issuing a four-point action plan for ballot reform. In addition to introducing independent observers, they would scrap Labour's plans for all-postal ballots and electronic voting..... The police are currently investigating allegations of postal vote fraud during the 2004 local and European elections in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Surrey."
Poll monitors to combat election fraud
The Observer, 3 April 2005

"The Labour Party deliberately rigged elections to Britain’s biggest local council because it feared losing power in the face of public opposition to the Iraq war, a judge decided yesterday. The postal voting system introduced by Tony Blair’s Government without any safeguards against cheating was responsible for 'electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic', he said.  Opposition parties immediately called for urgent changes such as individual registration to 'restore confidence in the electoral system'.... The Labour Party machine in Birmingham was condemned for trying to stop the trial and pre-judge the result."
Up to 3,000 people had ballot papers stolen
London Times, 5 April 2005

"Richard Mawrey, QC, a deputy High Court judge sitting as an election commissioner, who found six Birmingham councillors guilty of vote-rigging yesterday. In criminal courts recently there have been convictions for cheating in areas as diverse as Hackney, Guildford and Blackburn. The Electoral Reform Society predicts that many MPs may be challenged on the legitimacy of their victory, if next month’s election is close. If the general election were to be decided by a court rather than by the ballot box, that would be an astonishing indictment of British democracy, a hanging chad epic. So it’s odd that ministers are still refusing to talk about it.....Mr Mawrey himself was obstructed by the Labour Party at every turn. A lone star, he has had to pick his way through scenes that would have astonished a sheriff in a frontier town. The councillors found by police in the warehouse at midnight on the eve of the election in Birmingham’s Aston ward, surrounded by unsealed postal ballots; the box containing postal votes all in the same hand and same ink, and all for Labour; witnesses refusing to give evidence fearing for their children’s lives; a lawless Wild West in which the number of postal ballots had mushroomed from 24,000 to 70,000 in one year. The city’s returning officer agreed that the overwhelming number of ballots made it more difficult to spot fraud. I’ll say. Labour Party officials wanted to postpone Mawrey’s inquiry until after the general election; he faced them down. They withdrew their legal support from the accused councillors in the hope of delaying proceedings; he pressed on. Now he has caught their colleagues red-handed..... So easy has it become to steal votes, only the astonishing incompetence of the Birmingham crooks has brought all this to light. First, returning officers started to receive phone calls inquiring whether they would count envelopes that had been opened and resealed, containing votes which had been altered (answer yes). Next, bewildered people went to the polls to be told that they had already voted. And then opposition parties were amazed to discover that certain Muslim areas had swung towards Labour in the heat of the Iraq war. The vote-riggers had overplayed their hand."
This election could be stolen: prepare for voting fraud on a massive scale
London Times, 5 April 2005

"The postal voting system was condemned as wide open to fraud by the second judge in a week as a former Labour councillor was jailed yesterday for stealing 233 people’s votes....... Judge Peter Openshaw said that he had no precedent for deciding punishment because election fraud on such a scale had been unknown in Britain for 100 years.  Judge Openshaw, the Recorder of Preston, identified what he called obvious vulnerabilities in the system just days after an election commissioner in Birmingham blamed postal voting for fraud that would 'disgrace a banana republic'. The Director of Public Prosecutions is studying the commissioner’s report on six Birmingham Labour councillors who stole 3,000 votes. Yesterday’s case prompted calls for emergency measures to reform postal voting. Both cases this week have exposed Labour Party involvent in fraud.... "
Councillor jailed for vote fraud
London Times, 9 April 2005

"Welcome to the banana republic of Blackburn, the northern town where, according to one parliamentary candidate, citizens’ votes are no longer their own.
This week Craig Murray, a former diplomat hoping to become the local MP, will be writing to the Electoral Commission to raise his fears of vote-rigging in the constituency. The soaring numbers of people voting by post, he said, are leaving the election wide open to fraud. 'I’ve been approached by several people in the Asian community who are under huge pressure from Labour activists to apply for a postal vote rather than a ballot vote and then hand their postal vote over to the Labour party,' he said. 'That is happening now in Blackburn on a wide scale. In my career as a diplomat I’ve been used to precisely this situation abroad but wasn’t expecting to face it in the UK.' In Blackburn the contest is particularly tense. The sitting MP is Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and the local Muslim community is threatening to vote him out in protest over the Iraq war. In its efforts to hang on to every vote it can, Labour is urging people to register for postal votes; already 50% more people than in 2001 will be using the system in Blackburn this time. Many of them, claimed Murray, are facing pressure or even threats of 'repercussions' intended to influence who they support. The allegations in Blackburn are by no means isolated. The British electoral system, once the envy of the world, is under unprecedented fire. Last week, a special election judge said that Britain’s postal voting system would 'disgrace a banana republic', describing it as 'farcical . . . hopelessly insecure . . . (it) contains no effective safeguards and is an invitation to fraud'. He spoke after six people in Birmingham were found guilty of voting fraud in last year’s local elections. The judge identified 15 types of fraud involving thousands of votes in favour of Labour. On Friday a former Labour councillor in Blackburn was jailed for more than three years after admitting voterigging. The police are also conducting investigations in Woking, Burnley, Reading, Peterborough, Oldham, Bradford and Halton.... an investigation by The Sunday Times has revealed that last year senior government ministers were warned of the dangers of fraud. They felt so concerned that a bill was planned to tighten up postal voting — yet it was quietly ditched before it even reached parliament. At the same time the Labour party machine has argued against tightening postal voting security because it feared Labour supporters in particular would fail to turn out at polling stations. Not surprisingly, critics accuse Blair of ignoring clear warnings about fraud for party political gain."
Could the election be won by fraud
Sunday Times (London), 10 April 2005

"In Birmingham a judge has decided that six Labour councillors were part of a conspiracy to defraud the city council elections in June last year. The court heard tales of a vote-rigging factory where stolen postal ballots were opened up, changed and then resealed before being given to the returning officer. The judge ruled that two of the accused councillors had told a tissue of lies both to the police and on the witness stand. He said that the scale of the fraud was such that it could not have been undertaken without others within the Birmingham Labour Party being aware of it and doing nothing to prevent it."
Counting on change to stop the cheating
The Scotsman, 11 April 2005

Voting The American Way - Electoral Fraud Comes To Iraq

'Gott Mit Uns'

'President Bush gives a thumbs-up to Chief Justice William Rehnquist'
Photo - TIME magazine, European Print Edition p 38/39, 31 January 2005
'Celebration And Dissent'

"... the biggest threat to America is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that path."
Frank Zappa quoted in 'Lurching toward theocracy'
Online Journal, 5 April 2005

"President Bush has mastered the art of using religious rhetoric to capture the support of gullible evangelical Christians. Even while the federal debt and deficit skyrocket, the body count in Iraq continues to rise, and he makes war on the bill of rights, Bush has continued to maintain that he is a man of faith who is doing the will of the Lord. And so have others: see Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of George Bush and David Aikman’s A Man Of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush. Christian 'leaders' like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, Tim LaHaye, D. James Kennedy, John Hagee, and Jerry Falwell are some of the most vocal apologists for Bush and the Republican Party. Even that great paragon of virtue, Rudolph Giuliani, has gotten on the religious bandwagon, recently saying that 'there was some divine guidance in the President being elected'.... There is another regime in recent history that used religious rhetoric in wartime. Soldiers in the German Wehrmacht wore belt buckles inscribed with Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).... there are two passages in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was published in two volumes in 1925–1926, and which can be read today in print or online, that are uncanny.  In volume I, at the end of chapter 2, the Führer said: 'Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.' Substitute 'Muslim' or 'terrorists' for 'Jew' and this sounds like George Bush.... The lesson here is clear: The state uses religion for its own sinister purposes, and especially for that most destructive purpose of all – what Jefferson called 'the greatest scourge of mankind' and Washington called 'the plague of mankind' – war. But if war is so destructive then why does the state engage in it? As Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) so succinctly stated: 'War is the health of the State.'"
Laurence M. Vance - 'Gott Mit Uns'
LewRockwell.com, 20 December 2004

"This is like being at a Nazi rally.”
Karle Rove, President Bush's political strategist,
as he watches the crowd erupt to Bush making the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game
in the New York Yankees stadium October 2001
'The Inside story of US cabinet at war'
London Times, 23 Nov 2002

"When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his spokesmen began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, the most monstrous figure in modern history.  Everybody was therefore shocked when a high German bureaucrat turned the tables by comparing Bush himself with Hitler.  As to be expected, she (the bureaucrat) was forced to resign because of her extreme disrespect for an American president.  However, the resemblance sticks -- there are too many similarities to be ignored, some of which may be listed here..... Of course countless differences may be listed between Hitler and President Bush, most of which are to the credit of Bush. Nevertheless, the [thirty one] resemblances listed here are striking, especially since Bush’s first term in office must be compared with Hitler’s performance as German Chancellor through the year 1937, preceding the chain of events immediately preceding World War II...."
31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush
Dissident Voice, August 29, 2004
Click Here - To read the 31 similarities between Bush and Hitler

"He masterminded George Bush's transformation from boozing brat to national leader, and has been called the most powerful adviser in the White House. Now Karl Rove is in charge of the $150m campaign to re-elect Bush. Who is the man the president calls his 'boy genius'?.... By his own account, Rove's sights are set even further into the future than Bush's re-election. He has spoken about strategic shifts of power that happen every so often in American history..... The Republicans now control the presidency, the senate, and the house of representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the supreme court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more red-blooded Republicanism..... Like Dick Cheney, he avoided the Vietnam draft with a college deferment....In its last days, the 1994 campaign also turned nasty. Texan voters began receiving calls from 'pollsters' asking questions such as: 'Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?' In the business, it is called 'push-polling' and Shipley has no doubt who was behind it. 'Rove has used this kind of dirty tricks in every campaign he's ever run.' Only circumstantial evidence links Rove to the push-polling.... Last year, however, Rove's taste for personal politics entangled him in an extraordinary spy scandal. He is reported to have made calls to Washington journalists last July identifying a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, who was married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had called into question the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear programme. Rove allegedly told the journalists that Plame was "fair game" because her husband had gone public with his criticism. A grand jury is now investigating the leak of Plame's name, a federal felony. Rove has denied being its source, and Wilson believes now he may have tried to push the story only after her name had already been published. Rove has yet to appear before the grand jury, but he has retained an expensive Washington lawyer. It is a dangerous moment for Rove, but he has escaped from a litany of political scandals unscathed, and even enhanced. Bush's other nickname for the Boy Genius is 'Turd Blossom' - a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement. This year, there should be ample opportunity for him to earn the title."
The Brains
Guardian, 9 March 2004

"Karl Rove, the political sorcerer who is called 'Turd Blossom' by his political master, George W. Bush, has his nasty fingerprints all over the 2004 Election in a scam that can best be called 'Grand Theft Election.' There was something very wrong in Ohio, which Bush claims he won handily. Not only had the head of computer voting machine maker Diebold and Ohio's Republican establishment of Governor Bob Taft and Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell conspired to suppress registration and voter turnout in heavily Democratic precincts, but the Ohio Secretary of State’s web site was only reporting results from nine counties as of 11:30 a.m. on November 3, just three hours before John Kerry conceded the election to Bush. Totaling the results from the nine counties (Fayette, Fairfield, Geauga, Jefferson, Portage, Mahoning, Trumbull, Richland, and Washington), John Kerry was clearly ahead. A tenth county, Columbiana, suspiciously showed up as 'NO RESULTS.' The totals from the 8 Ohio counties reported on the Secretary of State web site were: BUSH 267,771, KERRY 294,648."
Grand Theft Election: Karl Rove's turd droppings all over this one
Online Journal, 5 November 2005

"The next time one of your smartypants liberal friends says to you, `Well, he didn't have a mandate,' you tell him of this delicious fact: This president got a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate for president since 1964."
Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist
Rove to GOP: Don't Grow 'Tired or Timid'
Associated Press, 17 February 2005

Election Fraud 'Mit Uns'

"Karl Rove, the senior political strategist who orchestrated President Bush's re-election campaign, has been promoted to deputy chief of staff, a job that will involve him in most White House policy and not just politics.... The promotion has rankled a few Democrats. 'Empowering Rove in this way shows that Bush cares more about political positioning than honest policy discussions,' said Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. 'Bush knows that Rove is neither an economic nor a national security expert. He is simply an ideological strategist. ... Clearly, Bush thinks political manipulation matters more than keeping the president honestly informed about the state of the country.'"
Rove's new position will involve policy
CNN, 8 February 2005

"The wartime past of a leading German contender to succeed John Paul II may return to haunt him as cardinals begin voting in the Sistine Chapel tomorrow to choose a new leader for 1 billion Catholics. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose strong defence of Catholic orthodoxy has earned him a variety of sobriquets — including 'the enforcer', 'the panzer cardinal' and 'God’s rottweiler' — is expected to poll around 40 votes in the first ballot as conservatives rally behind him. Although far short of the requisite two-thirds majority of the 115 votes, this would almost certainly give Ratzinger, 78 yesterday, an early lead in the voting.... Unknown to many members of the church, however, Ratzinger’s past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit.... The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, Ratzinger was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times. In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941..... Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944 and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp. He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile — comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest ordained along with the cardinal in 1951. 'Resistance was truly impossible,' Georg Ratzinger said...."
Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth
London Times, 17 April 2005

"..... the [British] government remains keen on electronic voting and is aiming at 'an e-enabled election some time after 2006'. Will this raise turnout or simply increase the risk of fraud? Several pilots have been held. In 2003, six local authorities electronically counted ballot papers where votes had also been cast electronically. Surprisingly, there has been no manual checking of the e-counting results. However, a full-blown test run of e-voting has been carried out elsewhere, with very instructive results. It shows that e-voting is neither secure nor tamper-proof, and allegations are surfacing that it may have affected the result. This dry run was the recent US presidential election. ... According to Harris, a manipulation technique she found in Diebold's AccuVote central vote tabulator is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set within its software. 'By entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes,' she has said. And she has demonstrated this live on television. Her conclusion is: 'You can easily edit the election.'.... We must be extremely cautious of the surge towards electronic voting. Before importing US voting systems into Britain, any software secrets in the machine technology must be made transparent. Software must be properly certified, and there must be paper trails."
Michael Meacher - Former Blair Minister
Political machinations
The government is keen to deploy e-voting despite evidence of ballot rigging
Guardian, 2 February 2005

Click Here To Read Full Meacher Article

More 'Gott Mit Uns'

"Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony, he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.' Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the 'Left Behind' series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - 'The Road to Environmental Apocalypse.' Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: 'The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.' He seemed to be relishing the thought. And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, 'to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?' Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, 'America's Providential History.' You'll find there these words: 'The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' However, '[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.' No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics."
Bill Moyers former host of the weekly public affairs series 'NOW with Bill Moyers' on PBS
Are We Doomed? Insanity Now Mainstream. There Is No Tomorrow
The Star Tribune, 1 February 2005

"As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality. In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them... The conversations Mr. Wead played offer insights into Mr. Bush's thinking from the time he was weighing a run for president in 1998 to shortly before he accepted the Republican nomination in 2000.   Mr. Wead had been a liaison to evangelical Protestants for the president's father, and the intersection of religion and politics is a recurring theme in the talks. Preparing to meet Christian leaders in September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, 'As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things, and some improper ways.' He added, 'I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement.' But Mr. Bush also repeatedly worried that prominent evangelical Christians would not like his refusal 'to kick gays.'... Talking to Mr. Wead, a former Assemblies of God minister who was well connected in conservative evangelical circles, Mr. Bush's biggest concern about the Republican presidential primary was shoring up his right flank. Mr. Forbes was working hard to win the support of conservative Christians by emphasizing his opposition to abortion. 'I view him as a problem, don't you?' Mr. Bush asked. Mr. Bush knew that his own religious faith could be an asset with conservative Christian voters, and his personal devotion was often evident in the taped conversations.... Early on, though, Mr. Bush appeared most worried that Christian conservatives would object to his determination not to criticize gay people. 'I think he wants me to attack homosexuals,' Mr. Bush said after meeting James Robison, a prominent evangelical minister in Texas. But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: 'Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?' Later, he read aloud an aide's report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: 'This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however.' 'This is an issue I have been trying to downplay,' Mr. Bush said. 'I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.' Told that one conservative supporter was saying Mr. Bush had pledged not to hire gay people, Mr. Bush said sharply: 'No, what I said was, I wouldn't fire gays.'... As eager as Mr. Bush was to cultivate the support of Christian conservatives, he did not want to do it too publicly for fear of driving away more secular voters. When Mr. Wead warned Mr. Bush to avoid big meetings with evangelical leaders, Mr. Bush said, 'I'm just going to have one,' and, 'This is not meant to be public.'"
In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President
New York Times, 20 February 2005

"The White House press room has often been a cockpit of intrigue, duplicity and truckling. But nothing challenges the most recent scandal there. The latest incident began with a sequence of questions for President Bush at his January 26 press conference. First, he was asked whether he approved of his administration's payments to conservative commentators. Government contracts had been granted to three pundits, who had tried to keep the funding secret..... a phony journalist, planted by a Republican organisation, used by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the press corps, protected from FBI vetting by the press office, disseminating smears about its critics and opponents, was unmasked not only as a hireling and fraud but as a gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail..The Bush White House is the most opaque - allowing the least access for reporters - in living memory. Every news organisation has been intimidated, and reporters who have done stories the administration finds discomfiting have received threats about their careers. The administration has its own quasi-official state TV network in Fox News.... Inserting an agent directly into the White House press corps was a daring operation. Until his exposure, he proved useful for the White House. But the longer-term implication is the Republican effort to sideline an independent press and undermine its legitimacy. 'Spin' seems quaint. ...... It is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power."
A Hireling, a Fraud and a Prostitute
Guardian, 17 February 2004

".... when Jeff Gannon, White House 'reporter' for Talon 'News,' was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career. But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the 'boy genius.' Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon. Planting or even just sanctioning a political operative in the WH press room is a dangerous precedent and Karl Rove's hope to become a respected policymaker will be hampered if the dirty tricks from his political past are more apparent than his desire to spread liberty around the globe."
Rove-Gannon Connection?
CBS News, 18 February 2005

"Now that is has been discovered that 'Jeff Gannon' (real name James D. Guckert), a 'reporter' for Talon News Service, a front operation run by the conservative Republican-oriented GOPUSA.com, was using an alias as a cleared White House reporter, details are emerging that threaten to immerse the Bush administration in a major scandal. 'Gannongate,' which is only now being mentioned by the mainstream news media, threatens to expose a potentially damaging GOP pedophile and male prostitution ring dating back to the 1980s and the administration of George H. W. Bush. James D. Guckert, using the name Jeff Gannon and possibly other aliases, was also running gay porn sites, one with a U.S. Marine Corps theme that solicited males for prostitution..... Gannongate is reminiscent of a huge political scandal that surfaced in Nebraska in 1989 when it was learned that Lawrence King, the head of Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha and a rising African American star in the GOP (he sang the national anthem at George H. W. Bush's 1988 nominating convention in New Orleans), was a kingpin—along with top Republicans in Nebraska and Washington, DC, including George H. W. Bush—in a child prostitution and pedophilia scandal. King was later convicted and jailed for fraud but pedophile and prostitution charges were never brought against him and other Nebraska Republican businessmen and politicians.The scandal, investigated by Nebraska State Senator Loran Schmit, his assistant John DeCamp (a former GOP state senator), State Senate Committee investigator Gary Caradori, and former CIA Director William Colby, reached the very top echelons of the George H. W. Bush administration and GOP. Child prostitutes from Boys Town and other orphanages in Nebraska as well as children procured from China were reportedly flown to Washington for sexcapades with Republican politicians. GOP lobbyist Craig Spence and a number of GOP officials in the administration and Congress were implicated in the scandal, including Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole's liaison to the White House. Young male members of the military in Washington, DC, were particularly sought after by the prostitution ring. During the early 1980s, a number of naval officers were implicated in a child pornography ring that extended from Oregon to the San Francisco Bay area and to Chicago and Washington, DC. The story about that ring was covered up by then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. The Nebraska pedophile scandal was similarly covered up on orders from the highest levels of power in the senior Bush White House. Caradori and his young son were killed in a suspicious plane crash in Illinois in 1990. Colby was found floating dead in the Chesapeake Bay, near his home, in 1996. Craig Spence allegedly committed suicide in 1989. Witnesses, many of whom were abused themselves, were intimidated and subsequently jailed in Nebraska and the investigation of the pedophile scandal eventually collapsed. The entire military aspect of the King-Spence scandal is now being repeated in Washington in Gannongate...... Last year, a senior source on the Washington Times editorial staff (the same paper that broke the GOP pedophile scandal in 1989) linked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to gay activities involving top Republican political strategists in Washington, DC. Gannon (Guckert) has been a major player in GOP and fundamentalist Christian politics in Washington and around the country. In 2004, 'Jeff Gannon' was a featured speaker at a Capitol Hill Bible reading sponsored by anti-abortion Operation Rescue head Reverend Rob Schenk. In 1995, Schenk was the spokesman for the American Center for Law and Justice, an anti-abortion group funded by Pat Robertson. Schenk was also a major supporter of former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office for refusing to comply with a federal court order. Schenk, who attended prayer meetings at John Ashcroft's Capitol Hill apartment after Ashcroft came to Washington in 1994, established his Pentecostal National Community Church at the dilapidated Giddings School in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Southeast Washington. One of his congregants was Ashcroft.... Gannon was also wired into the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He wrote a pro-Iraq war article for the March 1, 2004, issue of their magazine, American Enterprise. AEI employs such ardent neo-conservative figures as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Lynne Cheney. Ironically, many of Gannon's articles were anti-gay rights, such as one that insinuated that John Kerry's 'pro-homosexual platform' would make him the nation's 'first gay president.' "
Gannongate threatens to expose a huge GOP pedophile and male prostitution ring
Online Journal, 18 February 2005

'The Franklin Cover-Up' And The Mysterious Death Of Former CIA Director William Colby - Click Here

For More On The 1980s Repubican White House Call-Boy Scandal See
'Homosexual Prostitution Inquiry Ensnares VIPs' With Reagan, Bush
Washington Times, 29 June 1989

"Photographer Russell E. 'Rusty' Nelson was recently arrested two days after journalist Hunter Thompson reportedly committed suicide four weeks ago on February 10, according to two phone interviews with attorney John DeCamp last week. Nelson was allegedly employed by a former Republican Party activist to take pictures of current or retired U.S. House-Senate members and other prominent government officials engaging in sexual criminality by receiving or committing sodomy and other sex acts on children during the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations.... Hunter Thompson’s death and the news blackout of Rusty Nelson’s simultaneous arrest raise questions that someone may be attempting to limit Nelson’s freedom or threaten him, since according to testimony, both men had allegedly witnessed homosexual prostitution and pedophile criminal acts in a suppressed but far-reaching child sex-ring probe closely linked to Senate and House members--but also former President George H. W. Bush. [In U.S. District Court testimony, Rusty Nelson told Judge Warren Urbom he took 20,000 to 30,000 pictures, 2-5-1999, p.52]... DeCamp, a former Nebraska state senator and decorated Vietnam War vet, told TomFlocco.com 'there are tons of pictures still left; law enforcement is currently looking for them,' adding, 'you can also assume there are senators and congressmen implicated; otherwise this would not be such a big issue.'  But no federal official has stepped forward to protect Rusty Nelson's life, as Congress would be reluctant to hold hearings or force a federal prosecutor to probe its own members for sex acts with children--still punishable by law..... John DeCamp just released an updated 2005 edition of his original book about the secret White House-linked national child sex-ring entitled The Franklin Cover-up [$12.95 + $4.00 shipping: contact decamplegal@inebraska.com for 2005 edition]. The carefully researched and graphic expose involves convicted [and recently released from prison] GOP operative Lawrence E. 'Larry' King Jr. who allegedly hired photographers to capture legislators and high officials in compromising sexual positions with children while he managed the Franklin Federal Credit Union--according to court testimony on 2-5-1999. [Franklin was raided by federal agencies and shut down two days before George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988.]... After the Secret Service allowed Paul Bonacci to have access to the White House on July 3, 1988, one of DeCamp’s investigators said the young pedophile victim was able to draw a floor-plan of the presidential inside living quarters of the White House--an area not available to the public--lending stong credence to a June 29, 1989 Washington Times front page story, 'Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush,' when reporters Paul Rodriguez and George Archibald said 'Call-boys took midnight tour of White House.'... DeCamp's book reveals more clear evidence of witness tampering and possible accessory to murder..."
Photographer for White House child sex ring arrested after Thompson suicide
TomFlocco.com, 13 March 2005

Anglo-Saxon Totalitarian Cancer Spreads

"The Northern Territory Government [in Australia] is keeping a secret database of people who criticise the Government or its policies, it was learned last night. The files viewed by the Northern Territory News contained hundreds of names, party affiliations, their jobs or roles and a record of their comments to talkback radio. Opposition Leader Denis Burke yesterday accused the Martin Government in Parliament of acting like 'Big Brother'."
Australian Government keeping secret database of people who criticise policies
Courier Mail, 16 February 2005

"A British lawmaker was on Thursday ordered to leave the House of Commons after refusing to withdraw comments that Prime Minister Tony Blair misled the lower house of parliament over the war on Iraq two years ago.  MP Adam Price said that Friday will be the second anniversary of the vote on going to war with Iraq and the 'motion of impeachment (of Blair) is before us.' 'There is compelling evidence that the prime minister misled this house in taking us to war,' he said, 'Isn't it high time we held him to account?' Commons Speaker Michael Martin asked Price twice to 'withdraw that remark' but Price said he was unwilling to do so, according to a Sky News report. Then Martin said: 'I ask you to withdraw from the chamber. Leave the chamber.' Price, who has commissioned a report called A Case to Answer on 'high crimes and misdemeanors' in relation to Iraq, then left the House of Commons. The last lawmaker to be thrown out was the Scottish National Party's Annabelle Ewing, who left after branding Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon a 'backstabbing coward.' Under Commons Standing Order 43, the Commons Speaker is authorized to remove for the day anyone guilty of 'grossly disorderly' conduct."
British MP removed from parliament after claiming Blair misled lawmakers over Iraq
Xinhuanet (China), 17 March 2005

"Fresh evidence has come to light suggesting that Tony Blair committed himself to war in Iraq nearly a year before the American and British assault in March 2003.  The news will heighten the pressure on the Prime Minister to reveal how Britain was drawn into the conflict, in a week when a leading QC has called into question the legal advice on which the Government went to war. Such anxiety is felt in official circles that Special Branch detectives had questioned MPs over leaks, it emerged this weekend. ... Such an early commitment to war in Iraq by Mr Blair, who insisted well into the following year that British military options remained open, would reinforce speculation arising from a book published last week by Philippe Sands QC, a leading international lawyer. It repeats allegations that the Attorney General was 'leaned on' to change his legal advice when the war was imminent. It also emerged this weekend that Special Branch police questioned opposition parties in December about leaked documents on the war. The move to crack down on leaks is thought to be an attempt to prevent the full text of the Attorney General's advice from emerging, as well as further documents relating to the period nearly a year earlier, when Britain and the US were discussing 'regime change' in Iraq.   Special Branch detectives interviewed senior staff in the office of Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Adam Price, the Welsh nationalist MP, in an investigation ordered by the Cabinet Office into the leaking of highly confidential Foreign Office papers on the war in Iraq. Mr Price, who has led efforts to impeach the Prime Minister for allegedly lying to Parliament over the war, said he had refused to answer the police questions, believing the approach raised significant constitutional issues about Parliament's independence. The Plaid Cymru MP said he was told by the police the leak had caused 'seething anger at the highest levels".
New Charge Undermines Blair Claims on Iraq War
Independent, 27 February 2005

"I have had senior politicians privately call [the neo-cons] Brown Shirts. I have asked why don’t [the senior politicians] say this in public and there is response is that it would be political suicide...... If you look at what is going on with Iraq, Iran, and the global war on terror; the only way it makes sense is from a domestic prospective, In other words, when you ask yourself ‘how does this minority retain its hold on power’ the vehicle it uses is the post-9/11 environment that it exploited so well?..... War equals terror equals fear equals submission? ....I am not saying that the Neo-cons’ plans will succeed in the long-run. I am saying these are people who will use global instability as an empowering vehicle, politically, here at home..... [FBI director] Robert Mueller said he is a 100 percent certain that the US will be attacked by chemical and biological weapons. That’s a stunning statement if you think about it. I am a firefighter here in New York state, if we are going to be attacked by chemical/biological weapons; then why am I and other first responders not being mobilized to be trained in responding to that environment… in an emergency fashion? I mean this is a national security imperative..... It is a political statement to try to induce fear. The FBI came out with its own report about Al Qaeda that [states] while they may want to attack us, they don’t have the means, and there is no intelligence showing that they are capable of doing it.....there is no terrorist attack out there that will fundamentally harm the infrastructure of this country.... I lost my firefighter brothers that day [on 9/11], but the results of that attack were political. The twin towers falling did not stop farmers in mid-west America from harvesting their crops.... I think [the neocons] are very competent because they are succeeding. I would say logically, are they really this criminally disposed to fundamental evil? That is what they are really, evil.... There is not that many of them...[but] They have exploited a situation politically to the point where no one can challenge them. They just appointed John Bolton [as ambassador to the UN]. No one will stand up and challenge that appointment..... I am someone who believes that the world is a dirty place and for a great nation like the United States who wants to do right by the rule of law, etc., you cannot come in on a white horse with a white hat all the time if you want to take on the bad guys. You have to do 'some stuff.' The CIA happens to be the organization tasked with doing 'the stuff' and I am not against the 'the stuff,' as long as the people doing it are honorable people operating in accordance with the rule of law and are being honest and forthright about it. The CIA post-1990 became a corrupt politicized organization. They had already been on the track to that after, I would say right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it lost its big enemy, its focus. It became a very politicized entity. The CIA as an organization has no real integrity today.....I am formerly a big defendant of the CIA, formerly someone who was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was very closely involved with the agency during the 1990s with regard to Iraq. I am not speculating on any aspect when it comes to the CIA and Iraq. As an organization, it is a terminally ill organization. The CIA as an organization is not structured anymore to carry out operations with the integrity necessary to exist in a democracy. The CIA is so much about lies that it can no longer function interpedently, so politicized that it cannot function as an independent assessor of fact.....Of course there are good people in the CIA. They have not come forward because when they do and have come forward, they are destroyed. For example, I think we had a window of opportunity post Iraq for the CIA to clean house… it was clear that George Tenet lied. Instead of Congress coming forward and saying we have a problem: our oversight mechanisms are defective; we need to take a look at ourselves, the way the CIA intelligence community works, the way the House intelligence committee works; the way the CIA reports; the way that the CIA is directed by the President. Instead, we install Porter Goss who comes in and purges any potential voice of dissent, and then we get John Negroponte put above him… a man who has already lied to Congress about CIA covert activities. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what John Negroponte is going to be whispering to George W. Bush......"
Interview with former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter
Raw Story, 14 March 2005

"The Bush administration has produced look-alike news propaganda clips and then persuaded television stations across the country to air them uncritically and, often, uncut. As many as 20 government departments have produced fake news which stations broadcast as though they had produced the segments themselves, according to The New York Times. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is at the centre of a growing controversy over the same thing - using public funds to make short pseudo-journalistic films touting controversial policies and passing them on to local television news stations, which have aired them without comment. Both the Bush and the Schwarzenegger administrations have gone so far as to script introductory lines for the news anchor to read out.... An initial finding by California's legislative analyst's office last week found no legal basis for the Schwarzenegger administration's video releases. Los Angeles lawmaker Gloria Romero told a state Senate hearing: 'This is propaganda, produced at taxpayer expense.'"
Here is the news... from President Bush
Independent, 14 March 2005

Transforming America - Before It's Too Late

"I fear for '06."
Teresa Heinz Kerry
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 7 March 2005

TRANSFORMING AMERICA  - BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE Click Here To Find Out How "The foundation of the film director David Lynch and the US Peace Government organization are planning to open a Peace University in Moscow. In an interview to ITAR-TASS news agency, Lynch said that the university plans to open within a year. The organization plans also to open similar universities in St. Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don in South Russia. The US Peace Government was established on July 4, 2003 to bring prevention-oriented, problem-free administration to the U.S. Its mission is to prevent social violence, terrorism and war, and to promote peace and harmony throughout the world, its website says. 'Moscow is a very interesting, open city but it is prone to negative tendencies,' Lynch was quoted by the agency as saying. 'A Peace University is necessary for it. It is important to try all means in the fight against crimes, terrorism or wars. We propose to do it with the help of group meditation.' Lynch said he will be among the professors to give lectures in the university. The first university will be opened in Washington D.C. in roughly 6 months. The organization also plans to open further universities in the Middle East, India and Pakistan. The universities will have tuition fees for its peaceful education, about $2,500 per year for Moscow. 'The time for education depends on the personal traits of character and talent,' Lynch said." Film Director Lynch, US Peace Government to Establish University in Moscow The Moscow News, 24 November 2004 Visit US Peace Government Web Site - Click Here