not satisfied with the mess it made in iraq , neo-cons push for wider war ...

USAF Playing Cat And Mouse In Iranian Airspace
By Richard Sale, UPI Intelligence Correspondent

The U.S. AirForce is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt tolure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said.

"We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The flights, which have been going on for weeks, are being launched from sites in Afghanistan and Iraq and are part of Bush administration attempts collect badly needed intelligence on Iran's possible nuclear weapons development sites, these sources said, speaking on condition of strict anonymity.

"These Iranian air defense positions are not just being observed, they're being 'templated'" an administration official said, explaining that the flights are part of a U.S. effort to develop "an electronic order of battle for Iran" in case of actual conflict.

In the event of an actual clash, Iran's air defense radars would be targeted for destruction by air-fired U.S. anti-radiation or ARM missiles, he said.

A serving U.S. intelligence official added: "You need to know what proportion of your initial air strikes are going to have to be devoted to air defense suppression."

A CentCom official told United Press International that in the event of a real military strikes, U.S. military forces would be using jamming, deception, and physical attack of Iran's sensors and its Command, Control and Intelligence (C3) systems.

He also made clear that that this entails "advance, detailed knowledge of the enemy's electronic order of battle and careful preplanning."

Ellen Laipson, president and CEO of the Henry L. StimsonCenter and former CIA Middle East expert, said of the flights, "They are not necessarily an act of war in themselves, unless they are perceived as being so by the country that is being overflown."

Laipson explained: "It's not unusual for countriesto test each other's air defenses from time to time, to do a little probing-- but it can be dangerous if the target country believes that such flights could mean an imminent attack."

She said her concern was that Iran "will not only turn on its air defense radars but use them to fire missiles at U.S.aircraft", an act which would "greatly increase tensions" between the two countries.



*note from this blogger --the guys who brought us the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse for massively escalating the vietnam war wouldn't be trying and hoping to use such a provocation for war with iran ...would they ?

The air reconnaissance is taking place in conjunction with other intelligence collection efforts, U.S. government officials said.

To collect badly needed intelligence on the ground about Iran's alleged nuclear program, the United States is depending heavily on Israeli-trained teams of Kurds in northern Iraq and on U.S.-trained teams of former Iranian exiles in the south to gather the intelligence needed for possible strikes against Iran's 13 or more suspected nuclear sites, according to serving and retired U.S. intelligence officials.

Both groups are doing cross border incursions into Iran, some in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces, these sources said.

* note --now if a foreign government and it's military were training, financing and sending "trained teams" into the Us to carry out hostile missions , they'd be instantly branded as a state sponsoring terrorism and slapped onto the "axis of evil" list , invaded and attacked.

They claimed the Kurds operating from Kurdistan, in areas they control. The second group, working from the south, is the Mujahedeen-eKhalq, listed by the State Department as a terrorist group, operating from southern Iraq, these sources said.

The use of the MEK for U.S.-intelligence-gathering missions strikes some former U.S. intelligence officials as bizarre. The State Department's annual publication, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," lists them as a terrorist organization.

According to the State Department report, the MEK were allies with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in fighting Iran and, in addition,"assisted Saddam in "suppressing opposition within Iraq, and performed internal security for the Iraqi regime."

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, U.S.forces seized and destroyed MEK munitions and weapons, and about 4,000 MEK operatives were "consolidated, detained, disarmed, and screened for any past terrorist acts, the report said.

Shortly afterwards, the Bush administration began to use them in its covert operations against Iran, former senior U.S.intelligence officials said.

"They've been active in the south for some time,"said former CIA counterterrorism chief, Vince Cannistraro.

* hmmm...guess the neo-cons feel that there are the "terrorists" you demonize , hate and bomb to smitherines and the other " friendly terrorists" that you fund , train and then send to work for you in illegal war-provoking missions destroying those nations and toppling governments on that list that you don't like ...

The MEK are said to be currently launching raids from Camp Habib in Basra, but recently Pakistan President Pervez Musharaff granted permission for the MEK to operate from Pakistan's Baluchi area, U.S.officials said.

Asked about the Musharaff decision, Laipson said: "Not a smart move. The last thing he (Musharaff) needs is another batch of hot heads on Pakistani soil."

A former senior Iranian diplomat told United Press International that the Kurds in the Baluchi areas of Pakistan can operate in freedom because the Baluchis "have no love for the mullahs of Iran."

In fact, in the early 1980s, there were massacres of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the area by Baluchi militants who wish to be independent, he said.

Both covert groups are tasked by the Bush administration with planting sensors or "sniffers" close to suspected Iran nuclear weapons development sites that will enable the Bush administration to monitor the progress on the program and develop targeting data, these sources said.

"There is an urgent need to obtain this information, at least in the minds of administration hawks", an administration official said.

"This looks to be turning into a pretty large-scale covert operation," a former long-time CIA operator in the region told UPI. In addition to the air strikes on allegedly Iranian nuclear weapons sites, the second aim of the operation is to secure the support in Iran of those "who view U.S. policy of hostility towards Iran's clerics with favor," he said.

The United States is also attempting to erect a covert infrastructure in Iran able to support U.S. efforts, this source said. It consists of Israelis and other U.S. assets, using third country passports, who have created a network of front companies that they own and staff." It's a covert infrastructure for material support", a U.S.administration official said.

The network would be able to move money, weapons and personnel around inside Iran, he said. The covert infrastructure could also provide safe houses and the like, he said.



*note---so the mission is not just to thwart the iranian nuclear weapons project--weapons that any sovereign nation wisely or unwisely has the right to choose to obtain for its own security...weapons the Us and israel and pakistan already have ...the operation is a smoke screen for the larger Us goal of regime change in iran...

Cannistraro, who knew of the program, said: "I doubt the quality of these kinds or programs," explaining the United States had set up a similar network just before the hostage-rescue attempt in 1980. "People forget that the Iranians quickly rolled up that entire network after the rescue attempt failed," Cannistraro said.

The administration's fear is that by possessing a nuclear weapon, Iran will gain a new stature and status in the region strengthening its determination to remove the U.S presence from the region and making its hostility seem more credible, U.S. officials said.

* ---could it also be the administration's fear that any nation with large reserves of oil and nuclear capacity might use the potential threat of its nukes as a trump card to thwart imperial designs of a unilateral empire determined to line up remaining global energy reserves like ducks on a lake ?

There is also the administration's fear that Iran, with Syria's help, will accelerate Palestinian terrorism as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip, these sources said.

*---"palestinian terrorism" ??? what the Us and ethnic cleansing israel do in sending commando teams into a sovereign nation , and sending warplanes to invade the airspace of a sovereign nation is somehow NOT terrorism ?

So the United States, backed by Israel, is deadly earnest about neutralizing Iran's nuclear weapons site. "The administration has determined that there is no diplomatic solution," said John Pike, president of the online think-tank globalsecurity.org.

"Like the Israelis, the Bush administration has decided that forces of sweetness and light won't be running Iran any time soon, and that having atomic ayatollahs is simply not acceptable."

* --- a hostile and aggressive , nuclear israel teamed up with a hostile , aggressive , nuclear Us illegally plotting regime change and openly violating a nation's sovereign airspace and territory only make the nuclear defense option for a comparatively small nation like iran a necessity .

with the cowboy oil-garchy /matzah mafia up to no good as usual , "restructuring" the region to suit their terrritorial aspirations and financial interests ,the only option that would make them back off is nuclear ...once again in the name of "peace" the Us promotes , provokes and forces war...

Said Cannistraro of the administration's policy: "Its very, very, very dangerous."

*---this blogger agrees that this is a very dangerous ill-advised policy from a very dangerous illegal , illegitimate and out of control administration.

open letter from john conyers to the exit poll guys

Open Letter to Warren Mitofsky and Larry Rosin from Representative John Conyers, Jr.
by Representative John Conyers, Jr.
January 20, 2005

January 20, 2005

Warren Mitofsky
Mitofsky International
1776 Broadway - Suite 1708
New York, NY 10019

Larry Rosin
President
Edison Media Research
6 W. Cliff St.
Somerville, NJ 08876

Dear Mr. Mitofsky and Mr. Rosin:

I have reviewed the internal report you issued yesterday concerning your exit polling in the 2004 election, and, unfortunately, it has not caused my concerns and questions regarding the significant discrepancies between your polling data and the final electoral results to diminish.

In particular, I would note that there are a number of concerns with the explanations you posited in your internal report that do not credibly account for the unprecedented five point differential between your exit polls and the reported results. As I am sure you know, Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania has determined that such a differential was of a less than 1 in a 1000 likelihood - virtually impossible as a statistical matter.

To be frank, blaming such factors as distant restrictions on polling places, weather conditions, the age of exit poll workers, and the fact that multiple precincts were contained at the same polling place, as your report does, does not come close to explaining why the exit polls overstated support for the Kerry/Edwards ticket in 26 states and support for the Bush/Cheney ticket in only 4 states. Many of the factors you point to appear to merely be random characteristics of the election and your exit polling, rather than quantifiable and justifiable explanations. Nor can I believe that the massive discrepancies can credibly be written off to eagerness of Kerry voters to participate in the exit polls.

As a result, I would like to reiterate my request to receive the actual raw exit poll data that you obtained. I would also like to obtain copies of all internal deliberations, memos and other materials of your employees and consultants concerning or seeking to explain the discrepancies. To the extent you have concerns regarding releasing propriety information, I am willing to work with you to either receive this information on a confidential basis, or alternatively to bring in a neutral, outside expert to review these materials.

The stakes for our democracy are simply too high for us to allow this matter to pass without a serious and substantive review of the exit poll data. While the election is over, there is significant bipartisan sentiment in Congress and around the nation for voting reform. A complete and full release of the exit poll information will therefore not only help to resolve lingering doubts regarding irregularities in the 2004 election, it will also go a long way towards helping Congress understand how to best craft these reforms. I am hopeful that the media companies that contract for your services will also understand and support the importance of providing full, complete, and transparent information in this matter.

I would appreciate your responding to my office through my Judiciary Committee staff, Perry Apelbaum and Ted Kalo, 2142 Rayburn House Office Building (tel. 202-225-6504, fax 202-225-4423), by January 27th. Thank you.

Sincerely,

John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
House Judiciary Committee

cc: Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.
Chairman, House Judiciary Committee




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"Something is wrong in America" --Greg Palast interviewed by Daniel Strumpf

'Something is wrong in America’


An interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast
by Daniel Strumpf

San Diego City Beat

Sunday, January 16, 2005


Interviewing Greg Palast is a bit like rummaging through your mother’s nightstand—you’re bound to learn some things you’ll wish you hadn’t. As an investigative journalist seen on the BBC’s Newsnight and England’s most influential newspaper, The Guardian, Palast is most famous for exposing racist scheming behind the 2000 Florida election scandal nearly a year before the mainstream American media got around to it.

If you’ve never heard of Palast, an American himself, it’s probably because his muckraking investigations cause nightly newscasters to question their manhood and make bespectacled editors cower beneath their desks as they consider the possibility of retribution. But plenty of others have taken note.

Michael Moore used Palast’s articles about the 2000 elections as well as those probing links between the bin Laden and Bush families as the backbone of Fahrenheit 9/11. Palast chronicled his own investigative exploits in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tome that spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list. He also produced the critically acclaimed documentary Bush Family Fortunes. Most recently he landed a gig as a contributing editor with Harper’s magazine, and his articles regularly appear in Hustler magazine, in addition to various Internet sites.

CityBeat caught up with Palast last week, a day after the U.S. House and Senate certified the 2004 electoral vote, and he had plenty to say about the state of the American electorate. Palast will speak Monday, Jan. 17, at 7 p.m at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Hillcrest. But be forewarned: you might have trouble looking your country in the eye afterward.

CityBeat: You started writing about the 2004 vote count before the election. What have you found? Greg Palast: Before the Nov. 2 attack on our democracy, I wrote a piece called The Other Floridas because I saw the disaster heading in three states in particular—New Mexico, Ohio and Colorado—besides Florida, and I could see that the fix was in.

See, the real secret of the American elections is that we have an apartheid vote counting system. While the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave black and brown people the right to vote, it didn’t give them the right to have their votes counted. That’s left up to the states and counties and they have done a very good job of basically just chucking out a whole lot of dark-colored votes.

And how does it happen that black votes aren’t counted? They don’t put a mark on your ballot and say it’s a black vote, chuck it out. We have something in the U.S. called “spoilage”—in other words, votes that are cast but not counted. In the 2000 election, spoilage accounted for about 2 million votes. I suspect that when the numbers are done for this election, that number will be closer to 3 million votes.

Why don’t they count them? In most cases it’s bad machinery and, just like black and Chicano areas get crap schools and crap hospitals, they also get the crap voting machines.

The official investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in Florida in 2000 determined that one in seven black votes was simply thrown away, not counted for technical reasons. The horrible fact is that, as it turns out, Florida was pretty darn typical of the nation. About one in seven black votes are simply discarded. The No. 1 culprit, by the way, is punch-card machines. And while there is tremendous scrutiny and screaming and hollering about the new computer systems, that’s what Hitchcock called the “Mac Guffin,” the false clue.

In Ohio, they were more than thrilled to say, “OK, we’re not going to put in computers, but were not going to fix the bad punch-card machines.” So you ended with 93,000 votes lost to punch-card-machine errors—93,000! Overwhelmingly, those were cast in black precincts.

How did the addition of provisional ballots change the game?

You have these spoiled ballots there and then you have these new back-of-the-bus, Jim Crow ballots that were created for just this election, the provisional ballot. And that was the result of the Help America Vote Act…. As soon as George Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, I get very nervous.

These provisional ballots are saying that as soon as there is a problem with a voter—you get challenged by some Republican hit man at the polls—you get handed a provisional ballot. In the old days, you’d say, “No, screw you, I’m voting anyways. If you believe I’m a fraudulent voter then arrest me.” But instead, the Republican Party has challenged hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people all over the country in this election, resulting in massive numbers of provisional ballots, which were, in the main, chucked in the garbage.

And you think that influenced the outcome?

One state that people haven’t looked at is Arizona. People say, “Well, it wasn’t close,” but I suspect that Kerry won Arizona. I’m pretty confident he won Ohio, dead certain he won New Mexico, where, supposedly, Bush won by 5,000 votes, but you had a massive non-count of Hispanic and Native-American votes. If you’re Navajo, they throw out your ballot. You get provisional ballots, crap voting machines and they just don’t count them.

The House Judiciary Committee just released a report commissioned by Congressman John Conyers Jr. titled, What Went Wrong in Ohio? The report cited “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies” that were “caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior.” Do you think that report can fix the problem in Ohio?

The danger would be, just like the Civil Rights Commission before it, that if we particularize it to Ohio, we miss the goddamn point. The problem is systematic. It’s national. It’s racist. It’s classist.

You cannot fix the system through technical means. They tried that in 2000 and ended up with the provisional ballot, which was originally intended as a reform. Actually, it was Conyers who proposed the fucking provisional ballot and now he’s writing a report saying this is one of the worst things that ever happened to us.

If you don’t address the main issue, which is racism in vote counting, and you don’t address our failure to commit ourselves to democracy, then forget it—there is no technical fix which will work. Provisional ballots, computer voting, punch cards—forget all of that shit. That’s not what it’s about. There is no technical fix to democracy except a commitment to vote and a punishment that if they don’t count the votes, you’re going to go into the streets.

And I love Conyers. Everything in his report is right except the implication that something was wrong in Ohio. Something is wrong in America and the disease erupted in Ohio.

What did you think of the historic challenge to the Ohio vote count on the floor of the Senate?

The truth is that it’s unacceptable. I travel all over the world, and in Uganda they wouldn’t accept that type of non-count of the votes, votes thrown out, games being played, this kind of gotcha game.

The Republicans in Ohio, one of their favorites was if someone walked into the wrong precinct, they handed them a provisional ballot knowing that the secretary of state, Mr. Blackwell, had already ruled that if anyone voted in the wrong precinct, they wouldn’t count their provisional ballot. So they’re literally handing people ballots they knew in advance would never be counted. Think about that.

By the way—and I’m sure it’s the same way in California—when someone goes to the wrong precinct, that’s often simply the wrong table in a high school gym or something.

It’s very sophisticated. In the old days I watched the Boss Daley machine in Chicago steal votes by filling out fake absentee ballots and that type of game. Now it’s done by statistics, probability and racial profiling.

What the Republican Party did is a federal crime. The problem is the perps are in charge of the courts and in charge of the prosecution.... The response to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission outing the fact of the non-count of black votes in Florida in 2000 was to remove the chairwoman of the commission. She was just replaced with someone who will be quite pliant and bless the fixing.

So, if you predicted this would happen, you must feel somewhat vindicated?

No, I feel like hell. It’s my country, I’m an American and here I am broadcasting on BBC Television a week before the election how they are going to steal it and I’m showing these, basically, hit lists of black people from the Republican Party.

That’s against the law. You cannot do racial profiling for the purpose of challenging voters. It hasn’t been done since the Jim Crow era, and there they were, we caught them. But it’s pretty goddamn sad when you can’t report the news about your own country in your own country.

So if you exposed this information before the election, why didn’t the Democrats do anything?

The Democrats don’t stand up for the same reason that jellyfish don’t—they’re invertebrates. I found out from a member of the Democratic National Committee that what they were concerned about were people like Zell Miller and others in the party who were telling them that if they start defending the black vote, they are going to lose the white vote. I think that they are concerned of being seen as a defender of the black voter and would rather simply quietly take the black vote for granted and pander to the racism of the system.

Plus you have a problem that all politics is local. If a local politician is elected by a bent racial system, they are not going to go way out of their way to change that system, even if the top of the ticket suffers.

So this isn’t just a vast Republican conspiracy. You’re saying it goes beyond party lines?

Well, I think it is a vast Republican conspiracy in the technical sense. When I say that, do understand that I’m not a conspiracy nut; I’m a conspiracy expert. I used to be an investigator for government racketeering cases, which are conspiracy cases. These racial hit lists were copied to the research director of the Republican National Committee in Washington, and were sent to the chairmen of the Republican Party state committees. This is not like low-level trickster stuff; this is the coordinated national kind of lynching by laptop that was going on in secret.

If we had a different Justice Department, these guys would be up on conspiracy charges. This is a violation of civil-rights law, the Voting Rights Act and racketeering law.

You mentioned that your parents live here in San Diego. Have you followed our ongoing mayoral saga?

What that race shows is that we have lost respect for the core idea of democracy—that you count the goddamn votes. When they played games like that in the Ukraine, the U.S. refused to recognize the election. The U.S. didn’t say, “Oh well, I guess that’s the rules.” We said the rules are fixed by the rulers to make sure they stay in power. It ain’t acceptable. That ain’t democracy.

Same thing in San Diego. If you write in a candidate’s name, you can’t tell the intent of the goddamn voter? A legal voter casts a vote and they don’t count it? This doesn’t pass the basics for worldwide standards of elections.

And they have gotten us to the point where we actually accept this stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we don’t count those votes because someone didn’t check a box. Get into the goddamn streets! Close down the 405!

If Americans want to have elections where all the votes are counted, they have got to stop thinking that they can change the future by hitting that remote-control button. That’s one thing the Ukrainians did—they went out into the street in below-freezing weather and shut the country down. The Yugoslavs, the Peruvians, the Nigerians all went out into the street at gunpoint and said, “We aren’t tolerating this.”

If you want to have a regime determined by manipulation and games, then you deserve it. It isn’t good enough to vote and say, “Well, if you feel like counting it, that’s OK.” Get fucking mad. Get angry because if you don’t stop them on this, it builds. When the Democratic Party didn’t take a stand in Florida, they were asking for Ohio—they were begging for it. And we see it in San Diego and Washington State. It’s the same thing.

You have an article coming out in the February issue of Harper’s about the Iraqi oil fields. Can we get a preview?

In the months before the invasion in 2003, I was able to get an inside document from the U.S. State Department detailing the division of the assets of Iraq, including the privatization of the oil fields, the chopping up and selling off of Iraq’s oil fields. It was detailed, everything [down to] changing the nation’s copyright laws—I mean just wacky stuff. This was the first military invasion in which the invading army had prewritten copyright laws to protect Microsoft and Sony.

So basically the military invasion was coupled with a kind of corporate takeover, and these plans were written by U.S. corporate lobbyists who sat there and just rewrote Iraq’s laws in advance. That included the division of the Iraq oil fields but here’s the big irony. You know who objected to the division and sell-off of the U.S. oil fields? The U.S. oil companies. They said, “We want you to reestablish the state oil company that Saddam had busted up.” And why would the U.S. oil companies want that? Well, what do the U.S. oil companies love more than owning oil fields? What they love more is $50-a-barrel oil. Look at what these companies are making. They haven’t seen money like this since the ’73 oil embargo. They are just rolling in it. They love OPEC.

What they wanted to do is make sure that once the U.S. conquered Iraq, we effectively have a seat on the OPEC council and that OPEC stays strong enough to gouge the wallets of the American consumer.

So, what I’ve found, and I can’t give you too much detail because I can’t scoop my own piece in Harper’s, is a story of this war between the anti- and pro-OPEC forces internally in the administration on how they divide up Iraq’s oil fields. Of course, what’s missing here is what the Iraqis want to do with their oil fields. No one is asking them. They’re not involved.

George Bush gets inaugurated in a few days and you, Howard Dean and others just contributed to a book called, What We Do Now: Manifesto for the Post-11/2 World. So what do we do now?

We have a drug problem in America and it’s called television. We have a nation being turned into a bunch of fucking droids and getting so fat that pretty soon Americans are going to start oozing into each other’s protoplasm. We’ll just be giant globs with several feet and several heads probably wired straight into the television. This is the future I see.

Someone asked, “How do you explain what we do next,” and I said, “Dance. Fuck. Fight.” Make yourself indigestible to the system so that if you are ever swallowed up, you will be vomited out. I really think so. Make yourself unemployable. You’ll never get an interesting job if you’re employable. Get arrested, form a punk band and go to Indonesia and fall in love with someone who doesn’t speak your language. I’m not kidding.


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http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=2743

someone asked if an underground hydrogen bomb could trigger an earthquake ...

before we start with the smirks and giggles...

i think it would be much easier to dismiss much of what gets slapped with the derogatory label of "conspiracy theory" , if the government would show that it's hands are clean.

it can't , because they aren't , so therefore we rightly question the "official version" of whatever the government tells us.

anyone know anything about "HAARP" ? as i understand it , one of the patents from the HAARP research was for a method of creating nuclear type explosions without the radiation . ARCO the oil company held the patent .

why an oil company would be interested in something like this , i really don't know ; but research into using the environment itself as a weapon of mass destruction began during WW2 and i believe continues to this day . that means it is possible that scientists have performed 60 years of research with millions of taxpayer dollars footing the bill on how to use the natural forces of the earth we live upon , to kill other humans .

if much of the research weren't classified by the military and unavailable to public scrutiny , there would be much less room for suspicion and we could clear up the doubts .

until the government and military come clean about the nature of what they have been up to with our tax dollars for 6 decades , researching magnetic pulse weapons , earthquake bombs , tidal wave bombs , weapons designed to ionize portions of the atmosphere , weapons designed to change and redirect the jet streams of the atmosphere , weapons designed to dump torrents of rain on an area , it makes perfect sense to BE SUSPICIOUS .

this government dumped tons of defoliants on south east asian rainforest, possibly causing unknown damage to the world's ecosystem , as well as possibly causing cancers and birth defects among america's own soldiers and their offspring , and among the inhabitants of the region .

this government has already dumped 4 million pounds of depleted uranium on iraq during this present gulf war ...we have no idea what the results of this will be as minute particles of DU enter the environment and become circulated throughout the region's water and air .

look at the tens of thousands of veterans suffering with gulf war syndrome from the first war and tell me you trust this government to behave responsibly and come clean about merely the "side effects" of the weapons it has developed .

in the recent campaign that destroyed fallujah , how much depleted uranium was scattered through the remains of the city from tank shells and airstrikes from those aircraft mini-guns and cannons ?

the Us admits to using napalm there ,while some of the residents and observers claim that even worse chemical weapons were used in fallujah by the Us , supposedly leaving some corpses with unusual discolorations .

a few inhabitants have returned to what was once the city of fallujah . were they warned about the dangers above and beyond merely being warned not to consume any foods they may have left in their homes when they evacuated the city ?


i realize that i may be rambling here , but the point is , WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT RESEARCH THE GOVERNMENT HAS DONE .

We do not know what classified and secret research and weapons they have developed during the 50year , 6 to 10 trillion dollar phoney Cold War against a nation one observer called , "the Mexico of Europe" .

We don't know what classified and secret research has gone on in the 15 years since the end of the Cold War...

One of the pillars that holds up democracy is accountability to the citizens by the government . there can be no accountability without a viable degree of transparency on the government's part .

the pentagon and the government need to be made accountable to the citizens and come clean as to what they have been up to for 6 decades with billions of our tax dollars .

if they did this , there would be no winds to fill the sails of "conspiracy theory" , because the government through its lies and secrecy , creates the conspiratorial atmosphere...

african 'tsunami'--31,000 die per month in congo crisis

africa even takes last in world disaster attention ...just goes to prove that you cannot rely upon others... as the elders would say,"if you want something done right , you have to do it yourself."

now if we could get some debt relief for africa and also get the mark thatchers of the world and others of his ilk , to stop destabilizing and overthrowing african governments... stop backing traitorous dictators who sign away billion$ worth in mineral rights for pennies on the dollar... dictators who provide no services to their citizens and then squander and loot the national treasuries ...

if we could end the ethnic conflicts and contrived civil wars, get rid of all of the corruption and all of the parasites both domestic and foreign , who are leeching the life blood of africa , then the continent could begin to make some real 'quality of life' progress for its long suffering people.




RC Study Reveals 31,000 Die Monthly in Congo Conflict and 3.8 Million Died in Past Six Years. When Will the World Pay Attention?



December 9, 2004 Amid a rapidly deteriorating security situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the International Rescue Committee issued a mortality survey today which finds that more than 3.8 million people have died there since the start of the war in August, 1998 and more than 31,000 civilians continue to die monthly as a result of the conflict.

“DR Congo remains by far the deadliest crisis in the world, but year after year the conflict festers and the international community fails to take effective action,” says the IRC’s Dr. Richard Brennan, one of the study’s authors. “In a matter of six years, the world lost a population equivalent to the entire country of Ireland or the city of Los Angeles. How many innocent Congolese have to perish before the world starts paying attention?”

The latest mortality study, a joint effort by the IRC and Australia’s Burnet Institute, is among the most comprehensive ever conducted in a conflict zone, covering 19,500 households. Mortality data was collected for the period between January 2003 and April 2004.

• Teams of physicians and epidemiologists found that during this time more than 1,000 people died every day in excess of normal mortality, nearly 500,000 excess deaths in all, and almost half of the casualties were among children under five.
• As documented by three previous IRC surveys in DR Congo, the vast majority (this time 98%) were killed by disease and malnutrition, byproducts of a war that destroyed much of the health care system and economy.
• Of particular importance is the finding that insecurity has a powerful effect on death from both violent and non-violent causes. In the eastern conflict-prone provinces where insecurity often impedes access to humanitarian aid, death from infectious disease and hunger is highest. If the effects of insecurity and violence in Congo’s eastern provinces were removed entirely, mortality would reduce to almost normal levels. Such was the case in Kisangani-Ville, where the arrival of peacekeepers helped quell fighting, allowing the IRC and its partners to rehabilitate basic health care, water and sanitation services. Crude mortality rates subsequently declined by 79 percent and excess mortality was eliminated.

In Iraq, where Sadaam Hussein’s years of brutality, the effects of sanctions and three wars have led to far fewer casualties than DR Congo, the 2003 aid budget was $3.5 billion or $138 per person. Precise aid figures for 2004 were unavailable. The desperate situation in Darfur, Sudan, where an estimated 70,000 people have died and some two million have been displaced, has led to more than $530 million in foreign aid for 2004 or $89 for each person. In spite of DR Congo’s rank as the deadliest recorded conflict since World War II, the world’s humanitarian response in 2004 was a total of $188 million in aid or a scant $3.23 per person.

“The international response to the humanitarian crisis in Congo has been grossly inadequate in proportion to need,” says Brennan. “Our findings show that improving and maintaining security and increasing simple, proven and cost-effective interventions such as basic medical care, immunizations and clean water would save hundreds of thousands of lives in Congo. There’s no shortage of evidence. It’s sustained compassion and political will that’s lacking.”

The peace accords of 2002 fueled hope that the years of slaughter, displacement, sexual violence and desperation would come to an end. The subsequent deployment of international peacekeeping troops coincided with the withdrawal of foreign forces, leading to increased stability and humanitarian access and a dramatic decline in mortality. A new transitional government was established, tasked with reunifying the country.

In spite of all these advances, DR Congo is now dangerously close to sliding back into full-scale war. Political progress has stalled, the reduction in mortality has plateaued and a series of violent incidents threaten to undermine the peace process and destabilize the region. At this time, Rwanda is threatening to attack Hutu extremists in DR Congo, while numerous reports indicate an incursion has already taken place. This follows an explosion of violence in the eastern city of Bukavu in June and the brutal August massacre of nearly 160 Congolese Tutsi refugees at a camp in Burundi.

Urgent action is needed to restore stability, strengthen the peace process and address the underlying causes of the conflict. The IRC makes the following recommendations:

• Stop the Violence. The recent scaling up of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, falls short of what’s required, as the current force remains largely incapable of protecting civilians or Congo’s borders. It is crucial that all of the requested 23,000 forces be deployed. However, more of the same will not help. From the start, the troops have been poorly equipped and trained and lacking in commitment or will to carry out their mandate. It is vital that MONUC be given the training, equipment and resources necessary to implement their mandate— to disarm and apprehend Rwandan Hutu fighters, prevent cross-border incursions and arms flows, protect vulnerable civilians and restore stability to eastern provinces.

• Promote lasting peace. Donor governments must hold all parties involved in the conflict more accountable, ensuring they abide by and effectively implement the December 2002 Pretoria peace agreement and subsequent accords. Peace in the east must be made a priority. More pressure from the international community must be exercised on foreign governments, forces and militias to cease violent and destabilizing actions in DR Congo. Donor governments must also insist on improved management of Congo’s natural wealth and support recommendations outlined by the UN panel on illegal exploitation of natural resources in DR Congo. In addition, key governments must work toward improved coordination and implementation of the critical disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process for foreign and Congolese combatants.

• Vastly increase humanitarian aid. Save Lives. The current level of international humanitarian assistance for Congo is abysmal and basic needs are not being met. While European donors slightly increased funding in 2004, the US government reduced its support. In general, global donors have fallen far short of the UN’s funding appeal for DR Congo. This appeal must be met. As suggested by the IRC’s survey, simple inexpensive aid interventions could revive the health system and save hundreds of thousands of lives. The IRC urges donor nations to scale-up aid to meet the region’s immense needs. Congolese civil society is vibrant and needs to be empowered. With appropriate support, it will be able to regain self-sufficiency and mitigate further conflicts in the region.

December 2004 © International Rescue Committee

"The Tsunami of Iraq" by Dahr Jamail

** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **


January 15, 2005


The Tsunami of Iraq

The morgues at the hospitals of Baghdad are filling to capacity. At
Yarmouk Hospital in central Baghdad, the three freezers reek of
decaying
bodies, despite the temperature.

The smell rushes out at us as the doors are opened. I’ve smelled the
burning bodies on the funeral pires in Nepal…but this is different.
This
smell…how do I describe it? But it never leaves me, long after we leave
the hospital later.

The smell rushes out at us as the doors are opened. I’ve smelled the
burning bodies on the funeral pires in Nepal…but this is different.
This
smell…how do I describe it? But it never leaves me, long after we leave
the hospital later.

Many of the bodies

are from Fallujah, obviously picked off the streets-parts of which are
eaten by dogs
.
The bodies from Fallujah have the typical oddly discolored skin
,
along with other abnormalities
.

I walk out of the first freezer straight into a metal pole. Two of the
people with me, including Abu Talat, make sure I’m ok as I stand there
stunned…I didn’t even feel the pole, just that it stopped me from
proceeding to the next freezer.

Bodies are piled into the freezers

and most are uncovered, but not all. The hardest visuals to get out of
my head are those of the eyes
.

The doctor with us says that most of the bodies have been shot…and are
not from Fallujah. The violence against Iraqis continues
unabated…worsening by the day.

I do my job…taking photo after photo of the most horrible thing I’ve
ever seen in my life. Many of the bodies are so old they are shrinking
into themselves.

After the last cooler, we start to walk away. I am spitting, trying to
get the smell to leave me…Abu Talat is staring off into distance. After
I gag, the hospital worker who accompanied us to the coolers walks
towards me with a small vial of scent, and begins rolling it across my
upper lip.

“Shukran jazeelan (thank you very much),” I tell him, then he proceeds
to do the same for Abu Talat, then we walk on.

We talk with the doctor more as we shuffle along. “The morgues in all
the hospitals are filling with bodies everyday, most of them shot by
soldiers,” she says, “But also from crime and accidents. So many dead
civilians.”

We walk, well, kind of shuffle out of the hospital, towards the car.

“That is the most horrible

thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I say to Abu Talat.

We get in the car and just drive.

“I don’t know what to do,” I tell him, “What do you want to do?”

He holds his hands up, expressing that he doesn’t know either. “Let’s
just drive,” I say.

“Ok, I’m just trying to drive,” he replies.

I decide to go buy some supplies…grasping towards normalcy as I catch
whiffs of the decaying bodies despite the nice smelling scent that was
rubbed across my upper lip.

We buy some lunch only because it’s lunch time and we’re supposed to be
hungry, then drive the rest of the way to the hotel.

My head is spinning, as is Abu Talat’s. “I am traumatized,” I tell him.
“Yes, my head is spinning also,” he replies before adding, “I want to
take a shower.”

“I wish I could shower from the inside,” I tell him.

“From the outside it’s very easy,” he says quietly, “But how do we
clean
from the inside?”

We go to my room and I begin writing. The food sits in its bag on the
couch…Abu Talat says, “In Islam, if we touch a dead body, even if we
just see one, we should shower,” he says while walking into the
bathroom.

He pauses as he catches me staring out the window at nothing, “Hey,
don’t think about it. I know it is hard.” I slowly look up at him as he
adds, “It is harder on me, because I am Iraqi. My heart is shredding.”

He walks into the bathroom of my hotel room to take a shower, as I go
back to writing this.

Nobody knows who these dead people are. The coolers are full. Others
are
full too, in the other hospitals.

He finishes and begins to pray as I start my shower, trying to wash the
bodies away. It helps, some.

But it’s the eyes

that got me. And they won’t go away.


_______________________________________________
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com

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not making light of the recent disaster , but have to say 'rumsy' was probably right in this picture gag courtesy of "buckfush.com" 

"tsunami bomb" experiments-- experiments in natural "weapons of mass destruction"

this article was available to deskrat chronicles courtesy of an excellent blog called Rigorous Intuition






(courtesy of "rigorous intuition" located at

http://www.rigorousintuition.blogspot.com)

Devastating tsunami bomb viable, say experts



http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=14884


30.06.2000

By Eugene Bingham

Tsunami experts believe a bomb secretly tested off the coast of Auckland 50 years ago could be developed to devastating effect.

University of Waikato researchers believe a modern approach to the wartime idea tested off Whangaparaoa could produce waves up to 30m high.

Dr Willem de Lange, of the Department of Earth Sciences, said studies proved that while a single explosion was not necessarily effective, a series of explosions could have a significant impact.

"It's a bit like sliding backwards and forwards in a bath - the waves grow higher," Dr de Lange said yesterday.

He was responding to a Weekend Herald report of experiments at Whangaparaoa in 1944-45 to create a tidal wave bomb. The top-secret work by the late Professor Tom Leech was detailed in 53-year-old papers released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Dr de Lange said a coastal marine group from the university recently studied the likely impacts of underwater volcanic explosions.

Their work concluded that the next eruption in the Auckland region was likely to be under water, given the large amount of water around the city.

But tests showed a single explosion in the Hauraki Gulf would not trigger much of a tsunami.

"For most places the wave was less than 1m high, but it could be a bit more in the Tamaki Estuary."

Dr de Lange said the waves were not high because the energy was projected upwards, not sideways. He believed the same principle would be true for a tsunami bomb.

"You can't confine the energy. Once the explosion gets big enough, all of its energy goes into the atmosphere and not into the water. But one of the things we discovered was if you had a series of explosions in the same place, it's much more effective and can produce much bigger waves."

dsekou said...

peace , good blog man ... excellent work...

the more i read about this , the more my own "intuition" tells me the Us is using the tsunami disaster as a cover for a greater military presence in the area .

emerging local powers China and India can't be too pleased with the prospect of more Us military might focussed near energy supplies vital to regional industrial and technological modernization.


hope you don't mind if i post those "tsunami bomb" news articles at my "deskRat chronicles" blog at

http://www.deskrat.blogspot.com

--of course i will gratefully mention that the articles are courtesy of "Rigorous Intutition"...thanks and keep up the excellent work...peace
2:45 PM

" Bush 2004 vote does not compute" ...investigative journalists conclude

Ten preliminary reasons why the Bush vote does not compute, and why Congress must investigate rather than certify the Electoral College (Part One of Two)
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
January 3, 2005

The presidential vote for George W. Bush does not compute.

By examining a very wide range of sworn testimonies from voters, polling officials and others close to the administration of the Nov. 2 election; by statistical analysis of the certified vote by mathematicians, election experts and independent research teams who have conducted detailed studies of the results in Ohio, New Mexico, Florida and elsewhere; from experts who studied the voting machines, tabulators and other electronic equipment on which a fair vote count has depended; and from a team of attorneys and others who have challenged the Ohio results; the freepress.org investigative team has compiled a portrait of an election whose true outcome must be investigated further by the Congress, the media and all Americans -- because it was almost certainly not an honest victory for George W. Bush.

Crucial flaws in the national vote count, most importantly in Ohio, New Mexico and Florida, indicate John Kerry was most likely the actual winner on November 2, as reported in national exit polls. At very least, the widespread tampering with how the election was conducted, and how Ohio's votes were counted and re-counted, has compromised this nation's historic commitment to free and fair elections.

On Thursday, January 6, the Electoral College will be challenged by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and other members of Congress under a law passed in 1887 in reaction to the fraudulent election of 1876. A fuller investigation requires assent by at least one Senator.

As this vote nears, Ohio’s certified presidential vote (and quite likely those of at least Florida and New Mexico) is simply not credible. George W. Bush’s ‘victory’ appears to have resulted from multiple frauds – a GOP ‘do-everything’ strategy to win the state that swung the election.

In today's article, we list the top ten glaring flaws in the Ohio vote that have allowed Bush to gather the votes to ‘win’ the presidency in Ohio with an apparent margin of 118,775 votes - the result from an official recount that manually examined only 3 percent of ballots cast.

This list involves very large totals of uncounted, tainted or fraudulent votes. Taken together, they exceed Bush's margin of victory in Ohio.

These expert analyses are based on state and local Board of Election statistics, U.S. Census reports, and other public documents. They were not conducted with any assistance from John F. Kerry’s campaign. All the conclusions presented can be re-checked among the wide range of documents posted at freepress.org under the Election 2004 department. The authors will also respond to specific journalistic inquiries at truth@freepress.org. Additional key sources are specified below.

These flaws involve very large numbers of votes. But they cannot fully explain how the results were recorded on Election Day for one crucial reason: the paper and digital record trail needed to analyze the actual voting has been sealed from public scrutiny by Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, who both administered the state's election and served as the co-chair of Ohio's 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign.

Blackwell and other Republican officials continue to discount such criticisms. Blackwell has written that the election ran "smoothly." His office has refused subpoenas requesting him to testify, terming them a form of "harassment." Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett has said that this year's election had "fewer glitches" than previous ones. "We have bipartisan (election" boards and very specific rules and procedures," he says. "To have fraud within the counting process in Ohio, you would have to have massive collusion."

Nearly 85 percent of the state used paper ballots. Most were tabulated electronically – meaning an evidence trail exists, if it has not been destroyed or fatally compromised. But we have reason to believe this destruction has already occurred in a number of Ohio counties, rendering a full recount and audit impossible.

While the anomalies we have found in the Ohio vote are deep and serious, an in-depth study now indicates shocking parallels in New Mexico, which we will discuss in tomorrow's article.

The Bush-Cheney ‘do-everything’ strategy in Ohio covered a very wide range of tactics, from disenfranchisement of minority voters to discarding of ballots to tampered tabulators and much more.

Taken as a whole, this compendium of error, fraud, cover-up and contempt indicates that this was not a legitimate election, and is not worthy of being certified by the Congress of the United States:

1. More than 106,000 Ohio ballots remain uncounted. As certified by Blackwell, Ohio’s official results say 92,672 regular ballots were cast without indicating a choice for president. This sum grows to 106,000 ballots when uncounted provisional ballots are included. There is no legal reason for not inspecting and counting each of these ballots. This figure does not include thousands of people who did not vote, despite intending to do so in Ohio’s inner cities, due to a lack of voting machines, having no available ballots, intimidation, manipulation of registrations, denial of absentee ballots and other means of depriving American citizens of their rightful vote.

2. Most uncounted ballots come from regions and precincts where Kerry was strongest. In Hamilton County, 4,515 ballots or 51.64 percent of the uncounted county total, came from Cincinnati, where Kerry won 67.98 percent to Bush’s 31.54 percent. In Cuyahoga County, 4,708 ballots or 44 percent of the county total came from Cleveland, where Kerry won all 65 precincts. In Summit County, 2,650 ballots or 48.72 percent of the county total came from Akron, which Kerry won 68.75 percent to Bush’s 28.00 percent.

3. Of the 147,000 combined provisional and absentee ballots counted by hand after Election Day, Kerry received 54.46 percent of the vote. In the 10 largest Ohio counties, Kerry’s margin was 4.24 to 8.92 percent higher than in the certified results, which were predominantly machine counted. As in New Mexico, where George W. Bush carried every precinct whose votes were counted with electronic optical scanning machines, John Kerry's vote count was significantly lower among ballots counted on Election Day using electronic tabulators.

4. Turnout inconsistencies reveal tens of thousands of Kerry votes were not simply recorded. Systematic mathematical scrutiny reveals that the certified results at the statewide and precinct-to-precinct level display key patterns against a backdrop of implausible results. Most striking is a pattern where turnout percentages (votes cast as a percentage of registered voters) in cities won by Kerry were 10 percentage points or more lower than in the regions won by Bush, a virtually impossible scenario.

In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, Kerry won 346 precincts to Bush’s 125. The median Kerry precinct had 50.78 percent turnout, compared to 60.56 percent for Bush. Kerry’s lower numbers are due to local election officials assigning more voting machines per capita to Republican-leaning suburbs than the Democrat-leaning inner city – a political decision and likely Voting Rights Act violation. If Kerry-majority precincts in Columbus had a 60 percent turnout, as recorded throughout the rest of the state, he would have netted an additional 17,000 votes.

5. Many certified turnout results in key regions throughout the state are simply not plausible, and all work to the advantage of Bush. In southern Perry County, two precincts reported turnouts of 124.4 and 124.0 percent of the registered voters. These impossible turnouts were nonetheless officially certified as part of the final recount by Blackwell. But in pro-Kerry Cleveland, there were certified precinct turnouts of 7.10, 13.15, 19.60, 21.01, 21.80, 24.72, 28.83 and 28.97 percents. Seven entire wards reported a turnout less than 50 percent. But if the actual Cleveland turnout was 60 percent, as registered statewide, Kerry would have netted an additional 22,000 votes. Kerry is also thought to have lost 7,000 votes in Toledo this way.

6. Due to computer flaws and vote shifting, there were numerous reports across Ohio of extremely troublesome electronic errors during the voting process and in the counting. In Youngstown, there were more than two-dozen Election Day reports of machines that switched or shifted on-screen displays of a vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush. In Cleveland, there were three precincts in which minor third-party candidates received 86, 92 and 98 percent of the vote respectively, an outcome completely out of synch with the rest of the state (a similar thing occurred during the contested election in Florida, 2000). This class of error points to more than machine malfunction, suggesting instead that votes are being electronically shifted from one candidate to another in the voting and counting stage. All reported errors favored Bush over Kerry.

7. In Miami County, two sets of results were submitted to state officials. The second, which padded Bush's margin, reported that 18,615 additional votes were counted, increasing Bush’s total by exactly 16,000 votes. Miami County’s turnout was up 20.86 percent from 2000, but only had experienced a population increase of 1.38 percent by 2004. Two Miami County precincts were certified with reported turnouts of 98.55 and 94.27 percent. In one of the precincts this would have required all but ten registered voters to have cast ballots. But an independent investigation has already collected affidavits of more than 10 registered voters that did not cast ballots on Nov. 2, indicating that Blackwell's officially certified vote count is simply impossible, which once again favoring Bush.

In Warren County, in southern Ohio, an unexplained Homeland Security alert was cited by Republican election board officials as a pretext for barring the media and independent observers from the vote count. In Warren and neighboring Butler and Clermont Counties, Bush won by a margin of 132,685 votes. He beat Gore in these counties in 2000 by 95,575 votes, meaning an implausible pickup of almost 40,000 votes.

But Bush’s numbers meant 13,566 people who voted for C. Ellen Connally, the liberal Democratic candidate for Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice, also voted for Bush. In Butler Country, Bush officially was given 109,866 votes. But conservative GOP Chief Justice Moyer was given only 68,407, a negative discrepancy of more than 40,000 votes. Meanwhile, Connally was credited with 61,559 votes to John Kerry's 56,234. This would mean that while Bush vastly outpolled his Republican counterpart running for the Supreme Court, African-American female Democrat running for the Supreme Court on the Democratic side outpolled Kerry. By all accounts such an outcome is inconceivable. Again, it indicates a very significant and likely fraudulent shifting of votes to Bush.

8. Democratic voters were apparently targeted with provisional ballots. These ballots require voters to fill out extensive forms at the poll. Under extraordinary rules established by Blackwell these ballots were set to be discarded if even minor errors were committed. Poll watchers in Cleveland and Columbus have testified that most provisional ballots were given to minority and young voters. The same is true with presumed liberal college and university students. In Athens, where Ohio University is located, 8.59 percent of student ballots were provisional. At Kenyon College and Oberlin College, liberal arts institutions, there were severe shortages of voting machines when compared with nearby religious-affiliated schools. Students at Kenyon waited up to eleven hours to vote. Provisional ballots were also required of mostly African-American students at Wilberforce College.

9. Ohio's Election Day exit poll was more credible than the certified result, according to intense statistical analysis. In-depth studies by Prof. Ron Baiman of the University of Illinois at Chicago shows that Ohio's exit polls in Ohio and elsewhere were virtually certain to be more accurate than the final vote count as certified by Blackwell. Ohio's exit polls predicted a Kerry victory by percentages that exceeded their margin of error. Compared to the voter access, voting technology and vote counting problems in Ohio, the exit polls were far more systematic and reliable. Critics of the exit polls’ accuracy say too many Democrats were sampled, but a detailed analysis of that assertion shows no credible evidence for it. The stark shift from exit polls favoring Kerry to final results in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio all went in Bush's direction, and are, according to Baiman, a virtual impossibility, with odds as high as 150 million to one against.

10. The Ohio recount wasn’t random or comprehensive and may have involved serious illegalities. Under Ohio law, 3 percent of the ballots in a precinct are examined by hand. If the numbers match what was counted on Election Day, then the rest of the ballots are compiled electronically. In many districts, Republican Secretary of State Blackwell chose the precincts to be counted in a partisan manner, weighing the choices toward precincts where there were no disputes while avoiding those being contested. Moreover, there have been numerous confirmed instances where employees of the private companies that manufactured the voting machines had access to the machines and the computer records before the recount occurred. In at least two counties, technicians from Diebold and Triad dismantled key parts of voting machines before they could be subjected to audits for recount. In some counties, vendor companies conducted the recount – not public election officials. At least one county---Shelby---has admitted to discarding key data before the recount could be taken. In Greene County unrecounted ballots were left unguarded in an unlocked building, rendering the recount moot.

These ten points are among the most serious clouding the electoral outcome in Ohio, but are only part of a larger pattern. Their correlation with similar evidence in New Mexico, Florida and elsewhere gives them added gravitas. Scores of sworn affidavits and the on-going work of teams of attorneys, statisticians and other experts have revealed far more points of contention and suspicion, many of which we will present in tomorrow's article.

The sources used for this report are available at http://freepress.org. The statistical analysis was primarily done by Richard Hayes Phillips, PhD. A transcript of his deposition in the election challenge lawsuit detailing these findings can be found at: http://freepress.org/images/departments/Dep_Phillips.pdf. The exit poll analysis was by Ron Baiman, PhD, and a transcript of the deposition describing his analysis can be found at: http://freepress.org/images/departments/Dep_Baiman.pdf. Additional material appears in court filings in Moss v. Bush and related legal actions filed with the Ohio Supreme Court.

Taken together, these ten points involve votes that cumulatively exceed Bush's 118,775 vote margin in the state.

These flaws must be thoroughly investigated before Congress ratifies the Electoral College. The legitimacy of the presidency and American Democracy is at stake. In tomorrow's article we will outline more of the evidence leading up to Thursday's historic vote.

--
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION: VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004, a book/film project from http://freepress.org. Tax-deductible donations are welcome there and at the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, 1240 Bryden Road, Columbus, OH 43205.

not one damn dime day !

...borrowed this from a favorite website posted by "castro-oakland" ... a scholar , capoeira practitioner , family man , globetrekker , ben okri fan , cassandra wilson devotee and talented writer/ "bard of prey" in his own right ...thanks good brother...i wholeheartedly support the idea of "not one damn dime day!!!"





Author: Castro
Wednesday, January 05, 2005 - 12:25 pm

Not One Damn Dime Day


Since our religious leaders will not speak out against the war in Iraq, since
our political leaders don't have the moral courage to oppose it, Inauguration
Day, Thursday, January 20, 2005, is "Not One Damn Dime Day? in America.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in
Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer
spending. During "Not One Damn dime Day" please don't spend money. Not one damn
dime on gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases.
Not one damn dime for anything for 24 hours.

On ""Not One Damn Dime Day" please boycott Walmart, K-Mart and Target. Please
don't go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don't buy any
fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter).

For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down. The
object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and
illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their
responsibility to stop it. "Not One Damn Dime Day" is to remind them, too, that they
work for the people of the United States of America, not for the
international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations who
funnel cash into American politics.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is about supporting the troops. The politicians put
the troops in harms way. Now 1,200 brave young Americans and (some estimate)
100.000 Iraqis have died. The politicians owe our troops a plan , a way to come
home. There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing
agenda to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing
nothing. You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed.

For 24 hours nothing gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious
leaders and our politicians of their moral responsibility to end the way in
Iraq and give American back to the people.