Some of us knew that the 2000 election was stolen, and despite all the poof no one listened, in 2004 once again we saw improprieties and no one did a thing and now with all of this information coming out will anyone listen, no, will anything be done to rectify the wrongs that have been to the American people. And to those who follow blindly, without question how can you continue to tell yourself the same old lie, that W's doing the right thing? Wakeup America before the day comes and we fine that we are the insurgents.




Dec. 2, 2005, 10:42PM
Gonzales defends ignoring redistricting concerns Justice staff called GOP remapping plan illegal, memo says

By SUZANNE GAMBOAAssociated Press
WASHINGTON Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended the Justice Department's decision to ignore staff lawyers' concerns that a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay would dilute minority voting rights.
A Justice Department memo released Friday showed that agency staffers unanimously objected to the Texas plan, which DeLay pushed through the Legislature to help elect more Republicans to the U.S. House.
Senior agency officials, appointed by President Bush, brushed aside concerns about the possible impact on minority voting and approved the new districts for the 2004 elections.
Gonzales said the plan was approved by people "confirmed by the Senate to exercise their own independent judgment" and their disagreement with other agency employees doesn't mean the final decision was wrong.
The decision appears to have been correct, Gonzales said, because a three-judge federal panel upheld the plan and Texas has since elected one additional black congressman.
Of the state's 32 House seats, Republicans held 15 before the 2004 elections. Under the DeLay-backed plan, Republicans were elected to 22 of the state's seats in the House.
The redistricting plan has been challenged in court by Democrats and minority voting groups claiming it was unconstitutional and that district boundaries had been illegally manipulated to give one party an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is expected to announce soon whether it will consider the case.
"The Supreme Court is our last hope for rectifying this gross injustice. We couldn't count on the (lower) court. We couldn't count on the state, and we obviously couldn't count on the politically corrupt Justice Department," said Gerry Hebert, an attorney representing the challengers.
The plan was approved by the Republican-controlled state Legislature in special sessions after Democratic lawmakers fled the state capital in an effort to block votes on the new congressional boundaries.
An effort by DeLay to use federal resources to help track down missing Texas lawmakers led to a rebuke by the House ethics committee.
Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required under provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes it makes to ensure the changes don't undercut minority voting.
"The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect," Justice Department officials said in the memo made public by the Lone Star Project, a Democratic group.
Eight department staffers, including the heads of the Voting Rights Division, objected to the redistricting map, according to the memo which was first reported in Friday editions of The Washington Post.
Hebert said when a case is a close call staff lawyers usually include counterpoints to their conclusions in their memo. But he said there is nothing in the 73-page memo suggesting a plausible reason for approving the map. "So that raises a lot of suspicions about the motives" of the senior officials who are political appointees, he said.
Texas Democrats, some who had been told years ago that agency staff had objected to the plan, were outraged.
"The fact that the White House has covered up this document for so long provides a smoking gun pointing out efforts, led by Bush political appointees and Tom DeLay, to systematically cripple the voting rights of minorities," said Texas Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, one of the Democratic lawmakers who fled to New Mexico to thwart passage of the redistricting plan.
DeLay is awaiting a Texas state judge's ruling on whether he must stand trial on charges of conspiracy and money laundering in connection with the 2002 elections. The charges forced DeLay to relinquish his House majority leader post in late September.
DeLay and two people who oversaw his fund-raising activities are accused of funneling prohibited corporate political money through the national Republican Party to state GOP legislative candidates. Texas law prohibits spending corporate money on the election or defeat of a candidate.
Several of the DeLay-backed candidates won election, giving Republicans a majority in the state House in 2001, when the congressional redistricting process began.

Can Diebold machines pass the test
Reputation, sales riding on e-voting devices' ability to withstand new experiment
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Back in May, voting activists went on the Internet and for $300 apiece purchased two devices used to record moisture levels in corn.
Certain corn scanners use the same memory cards as Diebold Election Systems' optical-scanning machines for ballots and can easily modify them. That makes corn scanners into a tool for vote hacking.
Sitting by a hotel pool last spring in Florida, Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti wrote his own program onto a memory card so it could alter poll results on a Diebold machine in Leon County and flash a screen message "Are we having fun yet?" that shocked the local elections supervisor.
Prodded by activists with nonprofit Black Box Voting, California elections officials have agreed to a test hack of the Diebold voting machines running in 17 of its counties, from San Diego to Los Angeles and Alameda to Humboldt.
The test, first reported by the Oakland Tribune last week, originally was scheduled for Wednesday but is likely to be delayed until mid-December.
At risk for Diebold is reputation, millions of dollars in sales and possibly its mantle as the nation's largest supplier of electronic voting equipment.
If Hursti or another computer expert succeed in hacking Diebold's voting machinery, the McKinney, Texas, firm could be forced to redesign software fundamental to each major component of its voting system. Securing new state and federal approvals would bring delay and loss of sales the company is counting on prior to the June 2006 primary.
Counties face Jan. 1 state and federal deadlines for acquiring new, handicapped-accessible voting systems that also offer some form of paper record. Those counties relying on Diebold might turn to other voting-system makers.
As a result, there have been extensive, ongoing negotiations between Black Box Voting and the California Secretary of State's office, which also is talking to Diebold, over conditions of the test, confidentiality of the results and measures of success. Those talks continued this weekend, but state officials said they remain committed to performing the test.
"Secretary (Bruce) McPherson takes testing these systems very seriously," said his spokeswoman Nghia Nguyen Demovic. "He wants safeguards in place so that every vote cast is secured. He's doing his due diligence to assure voter confidence."
Last week, state officials said they instead will select the voting equipmentat random from a California county using Diebold.
The hacks there are two are almost elegantly simple.
Before every election, Diebold optical-scanning machines used in polling places are programmed for ballot and report details using memory cards. Touchscreen machines, as Alameda County uses, are programmed with PC cards.
Hursti realized this was a way into the voting system after looking at some of the Diebold software that Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris downloaded from an unsecure company Web site.
"Within 24 hours, he said I have found the Holy Grail," Harris recalled.
Hursti taught himself the rudiments of Diebold's programming language, AccuBasic. Using the crop scanner, he then wrote his own Diebold programs onto the memory cards.
Touchscreens apparently can be reprogrammed the same way, but more easily because PC cards can be written with a laptop computer.
The optical-scanning machines and the touchscreens are accessible to thousands of volunteer pollworkers on Election Day and often for several days before.
The AccuBasic files themselves are generated by the core of the Diebold voting system, a central vote-tabulating computer known as GEMS.
Another expert, Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist for Security Innovations, a Wilmington, Mass., computer-security firm, found that inserting no more than 60 lines of software into the computer's database program could change vote totals.
Getting the hack into GEMS requires access to the machine, typically kept in a locked room. But for an insider with that access, the rest of the task is as simple as sliding in a compact disc.
Both hacking strategies can be caught by recounting the ballots. California law requires a recount in 1 percent of precincts after every election.
But in Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions, elections officials do not recount absentee ballots, which are mailed in and scanned at election offices. Absentee ballots are more than a third of the vote in California and in several counties more than half of the vote.
"You just tamper with the GEMS database for the absentee vote, and then if you exclude the absentees from the one percent recount then you completely own the process," said Jim March, a board member of Black Box Voting.
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.


N.C. Judge Declines Protection for DieboldAP Online,
Monday, November 28, 2005 at 20:50
By GARY D. ROBERTSON Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- One of the nation's leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide against selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law.
Diebold Inc., which makes automated teller machines and security and voting equipment, is worried it could be charged with a felony if officials determine the company failed to make all of its code _ some of which is owned by third-party software firms, including Microsoft Corp. _ available for examination by election officials in case of a voting mishap.
The requirement is part of the minimum voting equipment standards approved by state lawmakers earlier this year following the loss of more than 4,400 electronic ballots in Carteret County during the November 2004 election. The lost votes threw at least one close statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months.
About 20 North Carolina counties already use Diebold voting machines, and the State Board of Elections plans to announce Thursday the suppliers that meet the new standards. Local elections boards will be allowed to purchase voting machines from the approved vendors.
"We will obviously have no alternative but withdraw from the process," said Doug Hanna, a Raleigh-based lawyer representing North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold.
David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said the company was reviewing several options after Monday's ruling. "We're going to do what is necessary to provide what is best for our existing clients" in North Carolina, he said.
The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system," as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software.
That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows.
The State Board of Elections has told potential suppliers to provide code for all available software and explain why some is unavailable. That's not enough of an assurance for Diebold, which remains concerned about breaking a law that's punishable by a low-grade felony and a civil penalty of up to $100,000 per violation.
"You cannot have a statute that imposes a criminal violation ... without being clear about what conduct will submit you to a criminal violation," Hanna said.
But because no one has yet to accuse Diebold of breaking the law, Wake County Superior Court Judge Narley Cashwell declined to issue an injunction that would have protected the company from prosecution. Cashwell also declined to offer an interpretation of the law that would have allayed Diebold's concerns.
"We need to comply with the literal language and the statute," Cashwell said. "I don't think we have an issue here yet."
Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a California primary election last year. California has refused to certify some machines because of their malfunction rate. California officials have agreed to let a computer expert attempt to hack into Diebold machines to examine how secure they are.
Diebold shares fell 71 cents, or 1.8 percent, to close at $38.93 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.



Black Box Voting has posted the prison records of embezzler and voting machine programmer Jeffrey Dean, and narcotics trafficker/ballot printer John Elder. Here is an update, including new information from what we will refer to as our "Dieb-Throat Choir" -- multiple inside sources in four separate Diebold Election Systems locations -- with what we have learned in follow up investigations on Diebold felons: First, give a shout out to BBV member John Howard, who contributed the following piece of information after looking into some of the information on the prison records we posted. "Tonight I saw something ..." John Howard writes. "When John Elder was released from prison he went to work for PSI Inc., 1915 S. Corgiat Drive, Seattle. 206-768-0415 (see http://www.bbvdocs.org/elder.pdf p12 of 24)




On Dec. 16, 2004 Judge William A. McKinstry issued a court order on case RG03 128466 forcing Diebold Elections Systems Inc. to honor certain security protocols.

Black Box Voting has learned that Diebold has been violating that court order. Black Box Voting investigator Jim March and Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris, lead plaintiffs in Alameda Superior Court Case RG03 128466, filed a claim against Diebold for making false claims to the state of California. Diebold entered into a settlement of this case, agreeing to a penalty of $2.6 million to reimburse California taxpayers, and also agreeing to court ordered procedures. Among the terms of the court settlement: Diebold agreed not to cross-connect a Diebold central tabulator to the Internet, and a requirement that Diebold strip the Windows operating system of any Internet connectivity programs/drivers/etc from use unless doing so would cripple system functionality. On Nov. 21, 2005, Jim March filed a declaration at the Diebold certification hearing in Sacramento, attesting to personally witnessing evidence that both these provisions were violated by Diebold. In San Diego, Internet connectivity was enabled both physically and by software so as to auto-update the countys Web server with election results. March obtained this information from county officials while in San Diego on July 26, 2005, shortly before he was arrested for attempting to view the vote tallying. California Election Code 15204 expressly requires election officials to allow the public to view all aspects of vote tallying. In Los Angeles, Bev Harris was prohibited from watching the vote tallying on Nov. 8, 2005. She interviewed tally center officials, who stated that the tallying was transferred through a private network to the Web and elsewhere, including a mainframe computer in the neighboring town of Downey, a location on the sixth floor of the Los Angeles division of elections in Norwalk, and from computers on the sixth floor into the secretary of states office, the Internet, and elsewhere. Little else could be learned in Los Angeles, because no viewing of crucial tally locations was permitted, and Los Angeles also stonewalled the Libertarian Party's request under Election Code 15004 to examine the voting machines before the election. (Los Angeles simply sent a nonresponsive response to the request, claiming that inviting the Libertarians to a Logic and Accuracy test should suffice.) In San Diego, Internet connectivity was enabled both physically and by software so as to auto-update the countys Web server with election results. March was told this happened through a firewall by Nokia and configured by SAIC with Diebolds cooperation. While a properly configured firewall helps prevent outside interference, it can be beaten in one of two fashions: by outside hacking inward, or even more easily by inserting a call-out program within the central tabulator to phone home, establishing a two-way connection from behind the firewall. It is precisely because of these risks that Judge McKinstry issued orders banning Diebold from Internet connectivity. Not only is Internet connectivity banned by the Agreement, but such connectivity is also banned by Diebolds certified procedures manual for the system, which can be found here: http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/procedure_items_5c.pdf (see item 7.4.7) The second violation of the court settlement was found in San Joaquin, Calif. During the course of an examination performed for the Libertarian Party of San Joaquin, March obtained printouts of installed drivers and connectivity programs, and found that no extraneous networking bits were removed. San Joaquin appears to be using a standard Windows 2000 installation. This should immediately be investigated further to confirm configurations in all California counties. If true, this would be a violation of the court settlement of some gravity. Diebolds continuing penchant for making misleading statements to public officials and violating court orders and violating regulations should result in this companys removal from the elections industry. If the state of California continues to certify Diebold Voting Systems, those public officials responsible for such failure to act must be considered as participants in a series of corrupt actions.


Bush in Iraq, Slouching Toward Genocide
By Robert ParryDecember 1, 2005

Despite pretty words about democracy and freedom, George W. Bushs victory plan in Iraq is starting to look increasingly like an invitation to genocide, the systematic destruction of the Sunni minority for resisting its U.S.-induced transformation from the nations ruling elite into second-class citizenship.
The Sunnis, an Islamic sect that makes up about 35 percent of Iraqs 26 million people, are being confronted with a stark choice, either accept subordination to the less-educated Shiite majority or face the devastation of Sunni neighborhoods, the imprisonment of many Sunni males and the deaths of large numbers of the Sunni population.
In referring to this possibility, many in Washington object to the word genocide which is defined in international law as the destruction of in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group but already there are troubling signs that Iraqs incipient civil war could slide into something close to that.
Retaliating against Sunni bombings and other attacks on Shiite targets over the past two years, Iraqs Shiite-controlled security forces have begun rounding up, torturing and executing Sunni men.
Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins reported from Baghdad.
Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills, Filkins wrote. Many have simply vanished. [NYT, Nov. 29, 2005]
In November, a secret bunker where Sunni captives were mistreated and apparently tortured was discovered in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad. The Shiite-dominated government has denied responsibility for the abuses and the murders.
But human rights groups and other investigators have blamed many of the Sunni killings on the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia associated with a leading element of the Iraqi government, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Council has close ties to the fundamentalist Shiite government of Iran.
Death Squads
U.S. officials also acknowledge that hard-line Shiite militiamen, who have penetrated the governments security forces, are operating death squads to terrorize Sunnis.
The killings and disappearances are reminiscent of the bloodshed in Central America in the 1980s when right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador unleashed security forces to round up, torture and kill suspected leftists.
That violence, however, was primarily defined by political ideology, rather than race, religion or ethnicity. An exception was the slaughtering of a Mayan Indian tribe in the Guatemalan highlands as part of a military scorched-earth campaign that later was investigated by a truth commission and denounced as genocide. [For details about Ronald Reagan's tolerance of these atrocities, see Robert Parrys Lost History.]
In Iraq, the religious component of the nations incipient civil war is already apparent, although Bush often has presented the Iraqi conflict to the American people as a war largely between foreign Islamic terrorists and freedom-loving Iraqis.
Bush finally dropped that distorted analysis in his Nov. 30 speech about his plan for victory in Iraq. He divided the enemy in Iraq into three groups the Sunni rejectionists, who resent having lost their privileged status; the Sunni Saddamists, who retain loyalty to ousted dictator Saddam Hussein; and the foreign terrorists, who have entered Iraq to fight the American invaders and generally spread chaos.
U.S. military analysts estimate that more than 90 percent of the forces battling American troops come from the first two Sunni categories, with the foreign jihadists representing only from 5 to 10 percent of the armed opposition. Though Bush didn't give percentages, he did list the groups in declining order by size, with the terrorists the smallest.
Yet what is problematic about Bushs analysis in terms of the genocide issue is that he identifies the vast majority of the enemy as Sunnis. That means both Iraqs Shiite-dominated government and U.S. forces in Iraq are already targeting a religious minority for defeat, establishing one of the first conditions for the definition of genocide.
Complete Victory
The next element in the equation will be how far the war against the Sunnis goes or put differently, how stubbornly the Sunnis resist.
For his part, Bush reiterated that he will only be satisfied with complete victory, which suggests he is resolved to break the back of the Sunni resistance at whatever cost.
The Bush administration also wants to keep a tight hold on information that might put the U.S. war effort in a negative light. That means the American people can expect to be shielded from many of the worst secrets in Iraq, much as the White House has continued to fight release of video showing abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.
According to U.S. military experts I've interviewed, a great deal of emphasis in the future will be on perception management, the concept of shaping how both Iraqis and the American people perceive the events in Iraq.
This media manipulation, combined with secretive death squads, adds even more to the recipe necessary for war-time atrocities that might cross over into genocide.
Other warning flags were raised in a New Yorker article by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, whose sources cited both Bushs messianic commitment to stay the course in Iraq and to a shift toward a reliance on aerial bombardment of enemy targets, as U.S. troop levels begin to decline.
A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the Presidents public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower, Hersh wrote. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.
The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the overall level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.
One of the risks is that the power to target U.S. air attacks would be put in the hands of Iraqs Shiite-controlled government, which could then rain down American death and destruction from the air on Sunnis and other rivals.
An example of this kind of horror occurred in the early days of the war in March 2003 when the U.S. military relied on a false report from a supposed informant that Saddam Hussein was eating at a Baghdad restaurant. The restaurant was bombed, killing 14 civilians, including seven children, though Hussein was not there.
The Sunnis also got a taste of U.S. destruction from the air during the assault on Fallujah in April 2004. With U.S. warplanes shattering the city with 500-pound bombs, hundreds of Iraqis many of them civilians died. There were so many dead that the city's soccer field was turned into a mass grave.
Gods Man
Hershs sources said, too, that Bushs fundamentalist Christianity has added another complication to the U.S. pursuit of a realistic strategy in Iraq.
Bushs closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments, Hersh wrote. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bushs first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the Presidents religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that God put me here to deal with the war on terror. The Presidents belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that he's the man, the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection (in 2004) as a referendum on the war; privately he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose. [New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2005]
Caught up in his divine mission, Bush has repeatedly rejected cautionary advice about Iraq, dating back to pre-invasion warnings from the likes of Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under President George H.W. Bush. Even now, military advisers say Bush gets angry when they bring him negative news about Iraq.
This mix of Bushs religious zeal and his refusal to accept reality adds another layer of danger as the United States slouches toward potential genocide in Iraq.
But some in Washington say it's outrageous even to suggest the possibility of the U.S. government engaging in a crime against humanity as severe as genocide. Despite the historical fact that much of the American continent was settled after genocide against Native Americans, the notion of such a present-day crime is considered unthinkable.
The Bush administration, however, already has crossed other bright lines of international law, including the invasion of a non-threatening foreign nation and complicity in torture, such as subjecting captives to simulated drowning in a process called water-boarding.
So, how unthinkable is it really that the Bush administration might venture across another boundary of civilized behavior?
What if Iraqs Sunnis dig in their heels because they suspect that their historic Shiite rivals plan to deny the Sunni population a significant share of Iraqs oil reserves, which are located mostly in Shiite and Kurdish territories?
With little choice besides living in poverty in Iraqs central desert, the Sunnis might decide that their best option is to continue fighting until the Shiites make far bigger concessions, such as giving a strong central government control of the oil riches.
If thats the choice the Sunnis make and if Bush sees his commitment to a complete victory as part of Gods plan might the Shiites then exploit U.S. air power to inflict a final crushing blow against their ancient enemies?
Perhaps cooler heads will prevail and excessive bloodshed will be averted. But if too many more lines get crossed, the rest of the world may extend the list of crimes already blamed on the Bush administration to include genocide.