Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
I agonized about making a record, but I wouldn't have wanted to make singles, 45s?the kind of songs they played on the radio. Folksingers, jazz artists and classical musicians made LPs, long-playing records with heaps of songs in the grooves?they forged identities and tipped the scales, gave more of the big picture. LPs were like the force of gravity. They had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours. Next to them, 45s were flimsy and uncrystallized. They just stacked up in piles and didn't seem important.
I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.
Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic."
Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.
I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.
As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history too?the history of a few nations and states?and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart.
I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong.
--Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. I (34-35)
I'm feelin pretty bleary eyed. It's been a pretty weird semester, I think you'd all agree. Nonetheless I am not as angry as I might have expected to be... The feeling I get these days is "Oh, here we go for another round of the nonsense," but for some reason, at times I feel less terrified than usual. There is a large degree of uncertainty, as usual, but things could shake out in a good way, or else catastrophically fall apart.
I am still not done with Macalester this semester, and still have not had as much time as usual to follow things, but I will lay out some things about both the voting irregularity complex and the usual war madness. Then I am going to drink.
Then I will finish things tomorrow and Tuesday. Then it will be done. Don't expect more posts till late Tuesday at the earliest, more likely Wednesday.
It seems clear that the story about the Florida programmer Clint Curtis being asked by Republican Congressman Feeney actually has some legs, although it's hard to say how conspiratorial we should view this. It still sounds like a classic case of wildly unscrupulous bastards in Florida doing horrible things. Once again, Florida didn't let us down.
THE BRAD BLOG following the election mystery has returned to its former web address, now that they have gotten a better server setup. Brad Friedman just posted a whole batch of stuff about this guy Curtis, and the coverage he has gotten. Friedman says that a major news network is snooping around the story, and there was a good story in a local Florida paper (brad's comment) as well. The Raw Story is also all over some stuff in Ohio, including the Kerry campaign, who have filed a lawsuit alleging vote tampering in an Ohio county. Also some Diebold people were recently 'calibrating' a machine before the incremental recounts were to be held in Ohio, a county official testified.
From six days ago, Bob Fitrakis on what the special hearings in Ohio... heard. Brad Blog on candidate David Cobb's Judiciary Committee Testimony which was apparently pretty dramatic. WashingtonPost.com: Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio. Thanks, guys. The Official Kerry-Edwards Position on How to Handle the Ohio Recount, Sent to the Individual Boards of Election in the State.
The NY Times reports on it, hurray: Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote."See also the exciting "Ohio presidential vote challenged" The AP report which first cited "dissident groups" (via MSNBC). Sweet.
So where's the big picture? I don't really know, it seems like the electoral manipulation that could have very well occurred has been legitimized by the media pretty thoroughly now, yet finally we're getting some stories that are cracking the surface.
But then, back to the regularly scheduled program, i.e. the circus of idiocy known as 'the Beltway.' One thing we have working is the purge throughout the government, which might get rid of the more incompetent neo-cons, but also will likely gut the CIA and other pockets of sane people. Either way, people are getting fired, so we will get more dirt about the internal workings of the place, and some of the really bad ones might get fired.
There is a fairly good chance that things might straighten out on the international stage before February or March. If the Iraqi elections get some kind of assembly going, they aren't all killed, and the U.S. gets the hell out of the Sunni areas, then things might simmer down before the emerging civil war cracks all the way open.
Meanwhile the Israelis see an opportunity to lock in their stolen territory right now, but they also seem reluctant to attack militarily until things shake out with Arafat's successor and the Palestinian Authority. I haven't written too much about this because it is damn hard to tell where things are shifting, and everyone is in 'wait and see' mode.
I have noticed there is a major Public Relations offensive gearing up against Syria now via that instrument of doom, the U.S. cable TV network. Besides allegations on CNN about Syrians doing things in a segment about "Inside the Insurgency," we have Dore Gold. Former Israeli ambassador to the UN Mr. Gold was on the Daily Show pimping his book "Tower of Babble," critical of the United Nations. He kept arguing that the organization has a lack of moral standards etc. etc.
Jon Stewart did his best under the circumstances (Of course, Gold's statement is ironic because of the sheer number of times that his country has been singled out by the UN, and all those times that the United States has blocked Security Council resolutions against them).
Anyhow Gold insinuated that Syria was orchestrating the insurgency and Baathists were running stuff from there... He said this retroactively proved they could not be trusted to be on the UN Security Council and uphold world peace etc. His rhetorical strategy was really good here and he managed to reverse the times of cause and effect.
On the one hand, I think it is quite probable that people and arms are going from Syria to Iraq. There are plenty of Sunni tribes that span the Levant region into Syria, and these are the people that the U.S. has decided are Morally Incorrect Terrorists to Wipe Out from the Sunni Triangle.
I think it is worth noting that the Syrians used their time at the Security Council to attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, even while they trafficked arms up to the last minute into Iraq. That would qualify them as fairly interested in world peace, at least in this instance. As for terrorism, after 9/11 the Syrians have supplied the CIA with crucial intelligence against Al-Qaeda, which has directly saved us from terrorist attacks. We didn't lose that intel source until the Bush folks, cajoled by the neo-con crew of the Administration (probably on the basis of false intel, as usual) turned against Syria.
I've long expected a big anti-Syria thing to happen, and it seems like the time is probably at hand. The Syrian ruling clique has long opposed political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that support elements of Al-Qaeda's ideology. If Prez. Assad gets taken out then then the fundamentalist folks will be in a very strong position. If the U.S. keeps blowing away their cousins, then the war will spread.
One tiny thing... an old BradBlog post about the weirdness of Warren County, which had the mysterious Nov. 2 lockdown and a really really high turnout for Bush. Warren County, OH anomalous count. I'll add this to the Wiki, and the other stuff, once I finish my papers.
(To the tune of "A Few of My Favorite Things")
"Ragheads" on TV and camels on sand dunes
Missiles that don't work and lame Jib-Jab cartoons.
Exploded limbs tied up with tourniquettes
While our President puts cameras on his pets.
Hoops brawls in Detroit and steroids in baseball.
Hockey in lock-out and NASCAR in freefall.
Sports gets the meatheads all bent out of shape,
Fuck the War in Iraq, Kobe's accused of rape.
Franken and Limbaugh are in syndication,
Martha in jail awaiting her probation.
Ken Lay does the perp walk, Reagan passes on.
Our troops mark Christmas with mortars at dawn.
With the car bombs,
And the street fights
I sometimes feel sad,
But then I remember the whopping tax break
That Congress gave my Dad
Ol' Dirty Bastard dies whilst he's recording.
Flags fly at half-mast 'til Wu-Tang's done mourning.
Falwell and Bennett take aim at the fags,
Robertson says Bush expected no dog tags.
Rummies will be Rummies, Aunt Condis promoted.
Arafats croak and Daschles be demoted.
Yuschenkos dine on some dioxin soup.
And most of the cabinet up and fly the coop.
Earnhart gets a biography on primetime.
Sharpton steals convention with his battle rhymes.
Paris Hilton gets the last laugh of all.
She flashes her cootch and collects the windfall.
If I turn off,
If I tune out,
I just might stay sane.
But I am a media addict and I
Want to see if Pale Male trumps Zahn.
Just a piece of Christmas cheer. Now I will go back to my cave and continue studying for finals. Thank you, thank you?tip your waitress, she works hard.
Hey all,
Sorry I have not posted jack in the last few days. AS I said before, it is finals time and I have been a most harried individual lately. Fortunately, the rest of my due dates are after the weekend so I actually have some breathing space now. At the moment, I'm at work but I really need to go to lunch, so I can't really say much.
However I will say that those of us who have qualms about the election process have been labelled 'dissidents' by the Associated Press. I'm down with that...
Apparently a county elections official in Ohio just testified that they saw someone from the "Triad" voting machine company strip down a machine to its parts and "adjust" it just prior to the Ohio recount. There has been a lot of other stuff going on with Rep. Conyers and the Dems snooping around. Cheers to them, I say. Also there were big articles in the Washington Post and NY Times about what the hell happened in Ohio today, which makes me happy.
I don't know but it seems like the story might finally be cracking.... a day after the bastards certified the Electoral College. Blach....
In any case, refer to http://bradblogtoo.blogspot.com for the latest, he's doin a damn fine job.
Its the middle of finals time, and I was delayed in putting this post together for the better part of the week. Here it is, hodgepodgy and overgrown with intrigue...
Now, kiddos, it's back to tinfoil hat land for another installment of Tracking Election Irregularities, and we've got some great tales tonight. Sit back and hear of the prototype vote hacking machine that a Florida congressman allegedly ordered built, and hear more about offshore banking—and how the CIA may be so angry about Bush's purges that they're revealing some of the parapolitical financial arrangements used to finance their schemes.
(A quick note: breaking the programmer story caused the BradBlog site to get overwhelmed with internet traffic, so it got bumped over to BradBlogtoo.blogspot.com for now. more below...)
Do not assume these stories are credible. First, take them as examples of the kinds of ways the world might work. Then look at it as audacious journalism. Then, and only then, should you start on the what-ifs. and there are a lot of what-ifs tonight. Smoke the pipe of conspiracy, and get high on its strands of intrigue... Damn it, I'm feeling pretentious tonight.
First item for the hodgepodge: A contributing writer, Larisa Alexandrovna, at a site called RAW STORY (reposted by BlueLemur) found a couple news story references to 21 voting machines in good old Broward County, Florida getting rolled out of polling sites—after several days of voting—and possibly back to some local voting administration center. Apparently these machines may have been recalled because they showed the wrong votes for buttons touched. (story via DailyKos diary)
The RAW STORY writer's catch is that there ought to be some kind of chain of custody for these machines, and we ought to be able to find out what their serial numbers were, if they did exist. How many votes might be recovered from such machines? Were they wildly statistically skewed for Bush, as many other errors have been?
Who knows? Either way, she tried to pester the AP wire journalist that wrote the original story, who said they were "moving on." The Miami Herald doesn't seem to care much either. In the end, she had to post this story, incomplete, another frustrated path on the quest to find out what happened within the Black Boxes.
“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”
This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.
I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?
This brief mention in the AP was all I could immediately find. Documented in an article entitled “State lauds performance of touch-screen machines; critics uncertain,” other voting irregularities were briefly mentioned with the same terse detail. These references are delivered as a matter of fact, as if most of us should know that large-scale voting glitches occur and are corrected instantaneously.
How then are we to correct these issues for future elections? I wondered.
After some thought, I contacted an Associated Press editor not involved with the Nov. 4 article, who quickly dismissed me as “paranoid,” though I neither discussed the outcome of the election or commented on anything other than the 21 machines allegedly removed in Broward County.
NOW let's throw in some more colorful tales about these very sorts of tech specialists. This story is caroming around the Internet because, well, it's a darn good one. If, hypothetically, you were spoofing an election, you would need to pay off a lot of technical specialists, and for that matter, you would need source code designed to be compiled into voting machines that could manipulate the numbers. (Daily Kos :: Sworn affadavit: vote-rigging prototype developed for FLA congressman)
Fortunately, some programmer dude has surfaced claiming that a Florida Republican congressman paid him to make this code back in 2000, and now he's pissed about it. This story stretches off into all kinds of bizarre directions. The programmer has a website, JustAFlyOnTheWall.com.
Another election held and another election stolen. In 2000 Bush stole the election by restricting the ability to vote by those people most likely to vote against him. The abuses were wide spread and the Democrats and other groups that believe in each individuals right to vote put together an impressive attempt to make sure that every individual that wanted to vote would not be turned away. Everywhere you went there was booths where new voters could register. Celebrities in commercials were urging voters to get out and vote. Poll watchers were placed in polling stations across the country to guarantee that every voter would not be turned away on any technicality.
What these well meaning groups failed to account for was that they were defending the 2000 election fixing plan and not taking into account that this election would be decided not by voters but by the rise of technology. Every one might be allowed to vote but their vote, and your vote made no difference at all. The programmers had already decided who would win and by how much.
Prior to this election I personally sent out information to the media which should have been provided to the electorate. It was not. The biggest turnout in history had no chance to win this election or any other unless the programmers of the voting machine allowed it. I believe they will allow it less and less as the machines control the elections and the Republicans control the machines.
This is not speculation. It is not a rant designed to make the losers feel better. I speak from first hand information and unless people stand up and act, democracy in this country is ended.
While employed at Wong Enterprises, Congressman Feeney had requested if Wong could write a voting program that could alter the vote and be undetectable. As the technology advisor, I explained that as long as the source code was provided and complied under supervision, code which altered the vote and was undetectable could not be built. Another problem would be that no one would trust a program that provided for no paper trail to substantiate its accuracy. When the vote was flipped the paper trail could easily detect the fraud.
This request was early in my exposure to Congressman Feeney, so I was not familiar with what a total piece of crap he truly was. My assumption was that he was worried that the other side (the Democrats) would introduce voting machines which could manipulate the vote. Mrs. Wong volunteered that we (meaning me) could put together a quick prototype that he could view and show others.
I have recreated that prototype and posted it at http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefraudprogram.htm. It is essentially the same code that I built for the vote fraud demo for Congressman Feeney. You will notice that by clicking on the correct hidden spots on the screen, the vote will flip so that the Republican candidate will receive fifty one percent of the vote. The hot spots make it possible to flip the vote as often as necessary yet it will never fire accidentally so as to avoid detection. My prototype was actually very simplistic. The actual sequence to flip the vote could be as complex as the programmer wished or even to operate automatically. In cases when the Republican is already leading, the vote is left as is. I built the program to demonstrate that with proper supervision that the election machines would be safe. The code would not be able to be hidden.
The next day I complete the prototype and presented it to Mrs. Wong. I stressed how the tampering could be detected. She quickly set me straight as the to true intention. Her exact words were "If we can’t hide the manipulation, we won’t get the contract the program is needed to control the south Florida vote." Another confirmation of why I needed to get a different job. I would not build something that would defraud every voter in this country. Even better, I knew that as long as the election supervisors used proper computer procedures, no one else would or could either.
What I did not anticipate was that this country would allow the placement of voting machines where the source code was not provided. The programs were pre-compiled (you have no idea what is in them or what hidden triggers exist), and where no paper trail would be required to check their accuracy. Any moron could build a voting program that could flip the vote under those circumstances and no amount of testing could discover the deception.
The plausibility of the idea of this vote hacking software has been basically confirmed.
There are two main branches to the story. BradBlog has a more circumscribed look at it, having interviewed the dude in question a couple times, and offering a PDF version of his sworn affadavit that Congressman Feeley paid him to write the software.
Then, on the other hand, mysterious investigator Wayne Madsen writing on OnlineJournal.com has asserted that this is just an element of a complex scheme involving offshore banks tied to Iran-Contra schemer and Richard Perle's dinner friend (as Sy Hersh reported) Adnan Khashoggi. Madsen's exciting claim is that the CIA is really pissed off that the Bushites are trying to purge their agency, so CIA partisans have deliberately chosen to reveal part of their sketchy shadow finance network in an effort to smoke the Bushes. And they're showing this network to.... taa-daa, Wayne Madsen.
In other words, let me restate. I am not asserting that the above two paragraphs are true. In fact, Madsen's writings, the last round which I posted earlier, seem to fit like puzzle pieces into a classic paranoid conspiracy tale, like an Iran-Contra projected forward into our present context. It all sounds a little too slick to me so far. Nevertheless, I always enjoy a good baroque conspiracy yarn, and this one doesn't disappoint.
The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.
An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.
In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."
CANNONFIRE: Exposed: Funding vote fraud -- a "five star" investigation Digests the Wayne Madsen story. Don't know who Cannonfire is, but they are following along further.
OffshoreBusiness.com has got interesting stuff on the shadow financing.
More from Bob Fitrakis in Ohio. Suppression: STEALING VOTES IN OHIO URBAN AREAS. what happened in Columbus, Ohio?
Minor details for the obsessed Data tables from Ohio precincts, reflecting on the changes in registered voters etc.RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS : uncounted votes. comment from John Allen paulos. Also we got Warren County registration stuff here as well. Onward....
The tale of voting irregularities on Nov. 2nd has entered the realm of official record in Washington, as Congressman Conyers has called a hearing this morning, which I am listening to (unreliably) via C-SPAN online.
To watch the hearings unfold right now, check C-SPAN.org. Right now, they are talking about all kinds of things, including overwhelming concentrations of spoiled ballots in Democratic precincts. Jesse Jackson Jr. just came up. This is good stuff and it makes me feel better already! This should get a lot of media attention, thank God!!!
I got several books from Amazon this weekend that distracted me from the much-belated homework that is increasing before finals time. I started reading George Friedman's "America's Secret War," an unparalleled tome of wisdom about the late great War on Terror, intelligence agencies and what I'd like to talk about today: how the Bush administration knowingly sold false intelligence, mainly provided by Ahmed Chalabi, mostly about WMD, to the American public.
Now you might say, "That's old news" or "What? Chalabi lied?!" but this particular book is different, because Friedman is one of the founders of STRATFOR, an amazing organization kind of like a 'private CIA' that sells intelligence (strategic forecasting) to businesses and whoever else. They provide a free page of information every week, and it is always interesting. (Right now it's all about the Ukraine stuff)
Anyhow, Friedman's book turns a lot of things inside out for a more rational view of what exactly has propelled the U.S. to invade Iraq. It stresses how the points of view of various intelligence agencies are very important to understanding how events unfold. Fortunately, they've got a lot of the inside dirt on this.
The book's jacket claims to address "the real reasons behind George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and how WMD became the cover for a much deeper game." I have been one of those folks who believed that the WMD stuff was so overtly fake that someone should go to prison about it, but Friedman lays out how the guys in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans basically knew this stuff was baloney, but sold it anyway.
The real reason we invaded, according to the book, was to cajole the Saudi government into cracking down on the Al Qaeda movement thoroughly in its midst. However, this had to be covered up because the American public wouldn't support that. Blockquoth Friedman (p 250-1):
Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. It did everything to induce the United States to do so. Its strategy was to provide the United States with intelligence that would persuade the United States that the invasion was both practical and necessary. There were many intelligence channels operating between Teheran and the United States, but the single most important was Ahmed Chalabi, the Defense Department's candidate for President of Iraq. Chalabi... was the head of the Iraqi National Council, which provided key intelligence to the United states on Iraq, including on WMD. But what it did not provide the U.S. was most important: intelligence on Iranian operations in Iraq or on Iraqi preparations for a guerrilla war. Chalabi made it look easy. That's what the Iranians wanted.
The primary vector for Chalabi's information was not the CIA, but the [Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] under Abe Shulsky. OSP could not have missed Chalabi's Iranian ties, nor could they have believed the positive intelligence he was giving them. But OSP and Shulsky were playing a deeper game. These were old Cold Warriors. For them, the key to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the American alliance with China. Splitting the enemy was the way to go, and the fault line in the Islamic world was the Sunni-Shiite split. The United States, from their point of view, was not playing the fool by accommodating Iran's wishes on Iraq. Apart from all of its other virtues, they felt that the invasion would create a confluence of interests between the U.S. and Iran, which would have enormously more value in the long run than any problems posed by the Iraqi invasion. From the standpoint of OSP—and therefore of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld—Chalabi's intelligence or lack of it was immaterial. The key was alignment with Iran as another lever against Saudi Arabia. And there were more immediate effects as well...
You can judge for yourself whether Dr. Khalidi's statements to me about Chalabi, the Office of Special Plans and the faked intelligence in an interview last October fit into this framework or not. I think the interview still holds up real well. Friedman adds that "the entire point of the WMD rationale was to put France in a position where it could not reasonably object to the undertaking [i.e. the war]. (p 272)" There's more to how they actually argued the case to the American public—an interesting thing for any rhetorician to look at—but for now this is what I feel like typing in.
Well, that's really more of a metal helmet than a tinfoil hat theory. Coming up in a sec, we will return to Votergate. In the meantime, now you finally know a key underpinning of the war's rationale. Not bad, eh? I'll talk more on this book later, to be sure!
Well, today (if luck holds) the Mac Weekly comes out and I have a nice column, "Cracking the Black Box Election," which describes some of the voting irregularities that the mainstream media generally refuses to talk about. In a move that has already sparked widespread rumors that I'm a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, I have a reference to this site in the piece. For that, all I can say is that I'm a shameless Internet whore living in the age of self-made celebrity.
After press time, I discovered I made a couple mistakes in the column which I should correct here. In both cases, I understated the extent of examples of voting problems. First, I said that Volusia County double-counted hundreds of ballots in the 2000 election. In fact, they counted an extra 4000 votes fot Bush, and a Diebold optical scanner added a negative 16,000 votes for Gore... that is, subtracted about 30 times Bush's margin of victory, before a staffer caught the mistake. Another low-ball mistake on my part was saying that one machine in Broward County started counting a ballot initiative backwards at 32,767. In fact, a whole set of machines started counting backwards. I knew these things before I wrote the piece, but I slipped up and I'm sorry.
I was under a lot of time pressure when writing the piece, and quite hungry as well. My biggest complaint about the Mac Weekly this semester has been the irregular distribution of pizza, and I must call for equality and more grease from week to week as a solution.
Anyhow, I need to give some links. This week, Bev Harris at Black Box Voting stormed a farewell party for a Palm Beach County elections director, serving her with a lawsuit. Provisional ballot counting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio provided Kerry with 9,242 more votes, and there has been some legal wrangling about the qualification of these votes.
There will be hearings starting next Wednesday in Congress about voting irregularities, a source has told Brad Blog. I highly recommend checking out Bob Fitrakis' work in the Columbia Free Press (OH), who has been investigating the strange tales of Nov. 2. A public hearing he held provided the crazy quote about electronic votes jumping from Kerry to Bush that I started my piece with. Read this piece for stunning reports of administrative incompetence and very suspicious poll behavior from Fitrakis.
This PDF file sent as a complaint to Ohio's insanely partisan Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (via Bradblog) has all kinds of interesting stuff in it, including reports of odd irregularities, conservative judicial candidates awash in money, and the mysterious Warren County lockdown.
Well, sadly that's all I've got time for before lunch & class. Keep on rockin' in the free world.
THIS JUST IN: SAFIRE A DOUCHEBAG
You heard it here first, kids: William Safire is a big fucking douche. Today he is on about none other than... drumroll, please... the forces of freedom!
Yes, Mr. Safire, lighting up his opium pipe in the ivory tower of the New York Times building, decided he was going to enlighten us on the subject of the "Four Elections". In dogmatic claptrap terms, that means the elections for head of state that have been held in America, Australia and Afghanistan (pop quiz, Hongsketeers; can anyone figure out what these countries have in common other than the fact that they all start in "A"?) and the upcoming one in the big I: Iraq. According to Safire, (who will from here on out be known only as "El Doucherino") the three wins thus far by Karzai, Howard and Bush (yes, that's right, I switched the order—let Bush run Afghanistan for a bit—he was a kid once, you leave a mess, you pick it... oh wait, he never got that part, did he?) are examples of an outpouring of world sentiment in favor of the undefinable term "freedom."
Hold on a second while I wrestle my rage to the ground.... OK. The most he can say about Howard's role in the march of freedom is that he is an "American ally." I guess that the rest of the world's constitutional democracies are anti-freedom, not like the steak-chewing, SUV-driving, prisoner-torturing U.S. of A. I'll give him Karzai, and we won't even get into the Bush thing, but what exactly does he even mean? What is the point of this article?
Well, the point, as usual, is to demonstrate how smart El Doucherino thinks he is and how many top-level connections he has. In the application of his raison d'etre, we find Safire opining on Iraq because of the straight poop he is receiving (read: eating) from the Kurds about the status of Iraq:
From the Desk of El Doucherino:
My bona fides with the Kurdish people go back a generation, to friendship with their nationalist patriot, Mustafa Barzani. Kurds were the open source of a 2001 column reporting the presence of an affiliate of Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, in northern Iraq, where terrorists tried to kill Dr. Salih. Hungry Kurds first told me of Saddam's oil-for-food scam, and still remember Christer Elfverson, the Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the denial of $4 billion worth of food and medicine owed the Kurds.
Today their pesh merga is the readiest and fiercest Iraqi fighting force. In Iraqi uniform, these mountain warriors are helping to pacify Mosul; they want to avoid Kurd-Arab clashes, but a million Kurds live in Baghdad and their trained compatriots will defend them from terrorists. It's simplistic to prognosticate the coming election as 60 percent Shiite, 15 percent Sunni, 20 percent Kurd, 5 percent other. Only half the Shiites and Sunnis are fervent Islamists, while most of the Kurds are secular Sunnis. The result is an Oliver Hardy demographic: "a fine mess," susceptible to democratic surprises by charismatic local candidates.
So, in summary- we can trust everything the Kurds tell us, and the Kurds tell us it's all hunky-dory. As an aside, the running foreign policy battle between Friedman and Safire on the Times Editorial page can get quite silly on both sides, but lets remember that Safire hardly ever leaves the damn country, whereas Friedman (and Kristof) feel it is important to see the area one is reporting on.
Also, anyone who has a problem with the holding of the elections if they are to bear any resemblance to Rummy's "80% is good enough for me" faux-lection is a "pessimist" and a "foot dragger" aligned with the anti-American contingent so bitterly humiliated in the last few months, out only to win a vindictive scuttling of the greater good in Iraq, who's people El Doucherino feels such strong empathy for:
From the Desk of El Doucherino:
Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off the fourth election - the one scheduled for late January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national assembly that will write a constitution - lest they lose that vote, too.
As if that's enough, he even gets in his twice-weekly jab at the United Nations, attacking the U.N. deputy to Iraq 1999-2003, Christer Elfverson, as a "Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the denial of $4 billion worth of food and medicine owed the Kurds." For those of you who don't read El Doucherino often, his obsession as of late has been with the U.N. Food for Oil program, in which billions of dollars earmarked for food for starving Iraqis was siphoned off by Saddam while French and Russian corporations raked it in by buying at sub market rates. While the program was an enormous rip-off and a shameful misuse of the U.N., Safire acts like we didn't know any of this before we invaded, and that the invasion uncovered these hard truths.
In fact, the reason the food-for-oil program kept running has little to do with a complicit U.N. or a scamming France, and quite a bit to do with P.R. The greenie sissy liberals (my term—I'm not of their kind) were banging and haranguing on the issue of starving Iraqis in an effort to have the embargo lifted. Not willing to lift the embargo, we set up the Food-for-Oil program with the U.N. The reason we didn't call for its cancellation was public realtions realted: We couldn't afford to be seen as Iraqi baby killers.
Now that the right has nothing else to point to, now that the treads have worn off of the "Saddam was a ruthless killer and he had to be removed" bus and that bus has been sideswiped by its "Thousands of Iraqis are ruthless killers and they have to be stopped" counterpart, the traction is seen as being against international multilateralism, namely, the U.N.
In this spirit, they have chosen the World's Largest Douche, Baron Von Douchenstein, to investigate. For those of you not familiar with the Baron, his real name is Norm Coleman, and he is a very principled Senator from Minnesota whose deep-seated beliefs led him to switch parties and religions. The Baron is a busy man, and had to be ripped away from very official business— 
-in order to take part in this, one of five parallel federal investigations into "UNscam," as it is known. With El Doucherino and Von Douchenstein on the job, the world is a safer place for all.
AAAHH!
Sorry for that break in our regularly-scheduled program and allow me a minute to wrap this up. I have been a supporter of Safire's, though I agree with him on almost nothing. I used to feel that he was a true political insider, acting out in the way that egomaniacal conservative political insiders do. Now I feel differently—his columns as of late are a broken record, the dinner party ramblings of an individual that cares more about being listened to than being right. With his column winding down and his life reaching its final stages, El Doucherino is revealed as being, in the end, awed by his own panache. Enough of that rant. Selah.
It's December now... a long and cold one with little reason to believe that next year will be better than this one.
I am down in the library where I ought to be writing something about the nastiness of Development Politics for Spanish. As a source for nasty news about development in the Latino world, I recommend NarcoNews.com.
It could have been the best November of our lives. Instead, it's lookin' to be an optimistic crest before the long, dark slide towards whatever...
One thing I like about my living arrangements these days is that when I walk to school in the morning, I go past a series of newspaper boxes at the Grandview Grill, so I see the Wall Street Journal, Strib, Pioneer Press and a couple others right after I step outside. Today the PioPress said that November was tied for the deadliest month for U.S. troops. That I believe.
What did the Illuminati (and Hassan-i-Sabah) say? Nothing is true. Everything is permissible. I believe that too.