Dark clouds in Bush's future?

by **seemslikeadream** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 9:42 pm

That whole post was deleted and this was in it's place. HTML Comments are not allowed above I've linked to where the links are on DU. There was a problem at DU but not with the admins. There were a few posters, now tombstoned, that were trying to shut the discussion down.

by **seemslikeadream** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 1:15 am

<a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3836763">www.democraticunderground...04x3836763</a> <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1541405&mesg_id=1541405">www.democraticunderground...id=1541405</a> <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3837596">www.democraticunderground...04x3837596</a>

by **anotherdrew** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 4:02 am

Joe Conason rules! and yes, history will hold these mosters accoutable. Bush has killed more iraqis than sadam; I'm so god damn sick of this monsterous sham of a so-called war. Let this PIG bush reap what he has so dreadfully earned. Mark my words - bush pig W wont live 6 years more, at most. Words fail to describe bush, words were made to describe people and things, bush is now neither, simply an abomination.

by **Rigorous Intuition** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 9:21 am

"That whole post was deleted and this was in it's place. HTML Comments are not allowed" I didn't do that, and to the best of my knowledge I'm the only one, as the board admin, who can edit and delete the threads of others. (Which I haven't had cause to do.) I'm asking ezboard about it - it could be a bot of theirs, though I haven't seen one before - but given all their problems I'm not confident about ever getting an answer.

by **marykmusic** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 12:45 pm

Black Box Voting BlackBoxVoting.org finds voting scan machines hackable By Matthew Cardinale Online Journal Guest Writer June 7, 2005—Two new and startling discoveries announced by Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org indicate that Diebold Optical Scan Machines are vulnerable to, and designed for, hacking that would modify the results of an election. Whereas touch screen voting machines have received the most attention, she asserts, optical scanning machines pose as much cause for concern based on recent findings. In an interview for the progressive news community, Bev Harris, 53, explains in detail the recent developments. Harris asserts that her technical experts found, in research conducted publicly on Leon County, Florida, elections machines, that both the individual machines (which produce the poll tapes) as well as the central tabulator were hackable. "This is really the most important thing," Harris said. "Yes we can hack the poll tapes [and the central tabulator]. But what we've learned is there is a 'built-in' [on the individual machines] that provides the mechanism to hack any election on the poll tapes in the Diebold Optical Scan System." "It is something that should be looked at in a congressional Investigation," Harris said. "It's probably not an accident," Harris said, "because you can look back through the source code to see that [Diebold] went through some programming contortions to keep this thing there. It had to have been expensive for them, frankly." "When we saw the way they designed it [the ‘built-in']," Harris explained, "Harri [Hursti, computer expert] said, 'We have the Holy Grail.' The elections people are very concerned." Hursti is said to have confirmed that the built-in hacking program ‘lived' in the memory card of the "ballot box" on individual election machines, according to Harris. "What this means is that the program operates on the votes. You can change what's on there; it's just a disk," Harris said. "So when the optical scan machine asks it to count the votes, instead of using its own program to count the vote, it asks the ballot box how it should count, and that is what's so bizarre," Harris explained. Ion Sancho, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, reportedly allowed Harris and her experts to conduct a number of testing and auditing operations on their Diebold Scanning Equipment in recent months. "Mr. Sancho is famous for his integrity and openness," Harris said. "We wanted to get a county with an optical scan system so we could prove once and for all if they're vulnerable." A series of demonstrations were held on February 14, May 2, and May 26, in the Leon County Elections Offices, she said. With U.S. Representatives Corinne Brown (D-FL) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) on hand, Dr. Herbert Thompson, a professor of Computer Science, took less than five minutes to "hack" a central tabulator in the second public audit on May 2, Harris said. "[Election officials] loaded up an actual election. Elections are saved as a file. And [Dr. Thompson] went in and had his way with it," Harris said. "The second time they'd put in additional security measures, unbeknownst to us, and he got in even faster," Harris said. "And [Rep.] Corrine Brown said, can you make it so it changes, say one in every five votes? And [Dr. Thompson] was like, no problem! And she said, it is a problem!" It was after discovering problems with the central tabulator, that the BlackBoxVoting Team turned their attention to the individual scanning machines. Calls to the offices of Rep. McKinney and Rep. Brown were not immediately returned Friday afternoon. The canvassing procedure with optical scan machines has three elements, Harris explains. First, there are the Scantron-like ballots which are locked in a box. Second, there are the polling tapes, or receipts, that come out of each voting machine, which give results for each machine. And third, there is the central tabulator, or one machine that compiles all the results and prints. "And they check the [latter] two and call it good," Harris said. "Now how hard is it to make false results by ‘taking out' the two so that they'd match? If you can manipulate the poll tape and the central tabulation system, that will be all she wrote for most elections," Harris said. "My question was, can you [hack the machines] in a way that wouldn't be detected. And the answer we found is yes, absolutely." "We proved it by going down there," she said. On May 26, "we made bogus memory cards. We put them on the machines. And the cards told the voting machines how to come out. It proved the memory card was controlling the machine and not the other way around," Harris said. "We used real election results from Leon County. We simply re-wrote the program on the card, and we manipulated the recording of the voting. It would flip 'em, it would do different things, and the results came out wrong," she said. "Everybody is like, oh, paper ballots, we can check them if we need to, but that's not a true statement. That's the big distraction." Harris cites a number of cases where recounts of the actual ballots were not allowed by state officials. "I've been interested a long time in Diebold Optical Scanning Systems. Because a lot of times you go where the silence is, the thing that everybody isn't talking about. There was an orchestrated rush towards anti- touch-screen, but what's going on with optical scans, which have been in use for a decade?" "There have been changes in the law, erosions state after state, that it's becoming difficult to check paper ballots against the optical scan total," Harris said. Diebold's computer program is written in ABO basic, a new language written by Diebold. "They made up their own computer language!" Harris said. "Which is a flat-out violation of all FEC standards. It's completely against federal law not to use standard language." What's more, Harris said, "These machines have been tested and certified at least a decade, each time a new version comes out. What is their excuse for passing this? There's no way they could've missed it, and there's no way they could say it's legal." What Next? "There is a team that does field work that is doing a documentary," Harris said. "They got footage of when we found poll tapes in a downtown elections office garbage," she said, referring to a somewhat unrelated public records request incident last fall. "There were actually two times when we found poll tapes in a garbage, and we got the other one [at a warehouse] on tape ourselves," she clarified. The documentary (see www.votergate.tv) is being edited in England by Russell Michael and Robert Parillo Cohen, Harris said. "They've [covered] tremendous stuff that's been happening all over, including some elections in California." "It's the use of machines in the counting process I object to. What is needed is hand counting," she said. "We've moved to a very important point," Harris said. "We need to now get the complete set of memory cards used in 2004 and have them looked at by the right experts. We need cooperative counties with some anomalies and Diebold scanners. Someone needs to examine those memory cards to see if they were misused in 2004," she said. "I'd like to see cards from King County, Washington; Volusia County and Duval Counties, Florida; Du Page County, Illinois; and San Joaquin County, California. They're required to keep them for 22 months." BlackBoxVoting.org is said to be creating a technical report for release in mid to late June. BlackBoxVoting.org is still pursuing litigation with Riverside County, California, and King County, Washington, Harris said. Harris recently won $70,000 from Diebold-related litigation in California and also won a recent case in Palm Beach County, Florida. Public records from requests made after the November 2004 election are planned to be made available on Blackboxvoting.org in coming weeks. "We'll also be announcing a Diebold related action next week that should spread through the Internet like wildfire," she said. Matthew Cardinale is a graduate student, advocate, and freelance writer at UC Irvine. He may be reached at mcardina@uci.edu.

by **Starman** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 6:21 am

Putting this issue in context -- Again. Considering the horrible legacy of war crimes, treason and betrayal by America's top officials, on TOP of the willful lies and fraud they engaged in to sell this obnoxious abomination of war to a basically dumbed-down nation suffering from attention deficit disorder and delusions of righteous indignation covering for misplaced contempt of its illicit, unelected officials -- Impeachment is the very first necessary step to BEGIN to reclaim some vestige of self-respect and national dignity. When the unspeakable horror of the US's use of DU weapons is added to the mix of America's crimes, one must wonder if there's anything the US could now do to prevent it's being condemned and cursed for generations by the world's citizens as well as its own people it has caused so much suffering and pain ... Starman *** <a href="http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6481">bellaciao.org/en/article....ticle=6481</a> Tuesday 14th June 2005 (06h44) : Administration’s Offenses Impeachable Let’s consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago: A British citizen leaked a memo to London’s Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England’s MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication. So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn’t have and thus couldn’t. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States. So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It’s as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place. What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth. Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in. William Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for the prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war. The intelligence wasn’t flawed. The weapons weren’t hidden. Our elected leaders were lying. Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on trust. We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that we give them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through manipulation, propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy has been subverted. It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue to call it that because we have not the courage or stamina to demand its overhaul. We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their lies. By not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we condone hypocrisy, pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of Americans and Iraqis for strategic control of energy resources that we have no right to. Patriotism demands that we insist on the ideals of democracy, not that we support the "leaders" who cynically destroy them. What’s curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out. Don’t our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying about them? We are living in an age of no accountability. It’s also an age upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one’s future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true: America’s president lied to America’s people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It’s really no more or less than their duty. It’s also the first step toward restoring America’s integrity. <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/shetterly1.html">www.lewrockwell.com/orig6...erly1.html</a> by : Robert Shetterly Tuesday 14th June 2005

by **FourthBase** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 12:12 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>the notorious Middle East arm-dealer with intimate Bush-ties Khashoggi (whose wife is Osama's sister-in-law!)<hr></blockquote> She's also a Scientologist, if her name is Laura.

by **chiggerbit** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 1:13 pm

Sorry, but I disagree that the American public would react differently if they only were allowed by the media to be informed about the memo's contents. I think the vast majority of the hawk public loves a good war. They have been "spoiled" by all the easy ones of the recent past, ones like Panama, the Gulf war, etc. For the public, going to war is like watching a good football game, good entertainment. Of course, they--and the administration--overestimated the effectiveness of our overpowering technology. Once minds are made up on an issue, it takes a great deal of new contradicting information as well as a great deal of time to change those minds. In and of itself, I don't think this memo has that power. The only ones it will impact will be those who were on the fence all along. For the rest, it would be a big yawn. The only way this memo will have an impact will be (1)for the public to be reminded of all the other instances of deviousness, over and over, until Devious becomes Bush's middle name; (2) for the war to continue to go badly, for Joe Smith's neighbor kid to die; and (3) for the great American public to be faced with the reality of the deadliness of it by being slapped in the face with a draft. TIME is the crux, and by that time, this Bush will have completed his job.

by **PeterofLoneTree** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 4:02 pm

be (4) and perhaps a SEVERE economic recession, where we didn't have our 'bread and circuses' to distract us.

by **chiggerbit** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 7:03 pm

Stop and think about it. There is nothing new in the memo, other than finer details. Richard Clarke, Wes Clark, and Paul O'Neil had all been relaying the very same message, and look at how much difference they made---almost none, except to those who already understood the stupidity of the war. But it changed very few minds. I was astounded, then. The only way it can possibly make a difference now is if the Dems can pair these events every time with the "deceptive" description, over and over and over again.

by **antiaristo** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 8:00 pm

Chiggerbit, I beg to differ. The significance of this document is profound. First of all, it is unimpeachable. It is the minutes of a meeting of policymakers. Every speaker quoted will have had the opportunity to correct any errors before they are signed by the chairman. It is a legal document. NOBODY CAN SAY THEY DIDN’T KNOW. Nobody can say they’ve been misquoted, or out of context. From the perspective of the chairman, they are devastating. The chairman being, of course, Tony Blair. Tony Blair is now in terrible trouble, but you won’t hear about it in the British media. Britain will chair (that word again) the G8 AND the EU for the second half of 2005. Mr Blair, Britain’s chairman of the G8 and the EU, is now known by EVERYBODY to be a cold blooded murderer. Everybody now knows how history will remember Mr Blair. How many will want to be in a photograph with him, a future hostage to fortune? The G8 will meet at the home of the New World Order, which is the Royal & Ancient Golf Club at Gleneagles. Following that meeting Queen Elizabeth is planning to hold her own commemoration for the victory over Hitler. We’ll be told, once again, how wonderful she is. I wrote a few notes about our Tony. Some of it might be news. Blair comes from a Scottish Tory family of lawyers. He went to school at Fettes – an upscale Philips Academy. The school has strong liks to the Edinburgh Establishment and the Speculative Society (a den of Masonry of which Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is a member). After Fettes he went to Oxford (St Johns) and studied law. He showed no interest whatsoever in politics. During his final year he was recruited into the chambers of Derry Irvine, a Scottish lawyer (who had just taken over from Sir Morris Finer, dead at 57 just before he completed a Royal Commission on the press). AFTER GRADUATION FROM OXFORD BLAIR JOINED THE LABOUR PARTY. While training with Irvine Blair acquired a working class upwardly mobile Irish wife from Liverpool. Cherie also trained with Irvine. She later specialised in working for local councils AGAINST THEIR LOWEST PAID WORKERS. Despite being Scottish and under the age of thirty, Blair was selected to be the Labour candidate for Sedgefield. THE SAFEST LABOUR SEAT IN ENGLAND. Blair’s predecessor John Smith died a sudden death in 1994. On the day Mr Blair became prime minister his wife was made a Queens Counsel. QCs have the right to deputise as a High Court judge – that’s real power. The British people are unable to rid themselves of Mr Blair, whatever happens. He is being protected.

by **chiggerbit** » Wed Jun 15, 2005 12:32 am

Sorry, antiaristo, but you don't understand the typical American. Monday night football and our "reality" shows are more important to us than whether anything is "impeachable". We tend to suffer from CSD, probably a result of anoxic deprivation from our pollution. Take it from me, this memo is a BIG, rude, Homer yawn. Wave a flag in front of us, though, and we are ready to march in goosestep. How is it, do you think, that Karl Rove has been so successful? It is because he has to deal with a similar CSD every day, understands how they think. Shoot, most Americans don't even know who Tony Blair is.

by **smiths** » Wed Jun 15, 2005 6:13 am

there is a lot of truth in what chiggerbit is saying which makes it one of the most depressing aspects of all of this deceipt and death. america's experience of prolonged war was a civil war that seems quite distant part of the reason that europeans are generally more pacifist is their education but a large part is their experiences and memories of stinking putrid war and loss of life, pillage and rape, generations vanished. the british definately learnt the wrong lessons from the second world war and despite the fact that the downing street memo makes news there it is not because the average british person has a problem with illegal and unjust wars. they're proud if anything, love the glorious myth of their superior armies smashing a few foreign heads. australia is in some ways even more fucked up. the strongest national symbolism surrounds the stupid loss of australian life at gallipoli and most australians have very distorted perceptions of what it actually symbolizes. they are just as happy as americans to sit and watch the footy as the arabs die quietly and vote for the little arsehole john howard as long as their little area seems alright. and just like in america the opposition cashed in its values and dissapeared. i can just here the monty python lads nailed to their crosses whistling that tune

by **chiggerbit** » Wed Jun 15, 2005 2:14 pm

Ok, take a look at these two headlines, both for the same article. Which one has more impact? Which one is more accurate? New Memos Reveal Bush Deception on Iraq New Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq The Dems can't sit around and politely wait for the media to give these behaviors a sound bite.

by **Connut** » Wed Jun 15, 2005 2:54 pm

How about "New Memos Detail Bush's Iraq War Illegal Pre-Planning"? Too long, maybe?

Dark clouds in Bush's future?

Re: Bush Campaign Behind Election Fraud .Starman

Re:MUST READ! Election Fraud and DowningStreet Memo2

Re: Re:MUST READ! Election Fraud and DowningStreet Memo2

I don't know how this happened:

This is relevant

Administration Offenses Impeachable

Re: Administration Offenses Impeachable

memo

chiggerbit:The only way this memo will have an impact will

nothing new

nothing new?

nothing new

agreement

headlines

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