Electronic Vote Theft: It Helped Bush WIn in 2004 and It's Still an Issue

Good to see this being covered, though of course the corporate media will not touch it:

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, electronic voting was used to steal the presidential election right here in Ohio in 2004. John Kerry was the rightful winner in 2004 over George W. Bush. The secretary of state at the time, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and the governor, Robert Taft, used their power of electronic vote count to flip the vote to George W. Bush from John Kerry. 

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this? 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We watched it—I grew up here, Amy. We watched it, totally, right up close and personal. We did the accounting. I work with a political scientist named Bob Fitrakis. We’re about to come out with another book, The Strip & Flip of the 2016 Selection. They are stripping the voter rolls—and Greg Palast, the great investigative reporter, is doing great on this—removing African Americans, Hispanics, people who might incline to vote progressive, and they—so that—in 2004, they stripped 300,000 people from the voter rolls here in the urban areas. Bush only won by less than 120 [thousand]. And this year, about 80 percent of the vote nationally will be cast on electronic voting machines. There is no verifiability. In six key swing states—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona—you have Republican governors and Republican secretaries of state, and no method of verifying the electronic vote count. At midnight or whenever it is on election night, those two guys can go in there with an IT person and flip the outcome of an electronically counted vote within about 60 seconds. So all this millions and millions of dollars, people out campaigning and so on, can be negated by an electronic vote flip late at night on election night, and there is no way to verify what’s happened. 

AMY GOODMAN: They didn’t do this with President Obama in 2008. 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: They did. He had too many votes; he was too far out. They couldn’t—it would have taken them too many, to flip too many states. [inaudible] believe Obama won by well over 10 million votes. The last—the final vote count was in—official, was in 7 or 8 million. 

AMY GOODMAN: But what gives you this idea? 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Because we’ve seen it happen. When you compare exit polls, which are generally accurate to within 1 percent, with the electronic outcome, there are huge variations. And we have documented many dozens of different things that they have done over the years to flip electronic votes. 

AMY GOODMAN: How does e-voting, electronic voting, work? And who controls the controls on it? 

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, that’s the key. The electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations, which are Republican in orientation, generally. And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary. So, even the governments that buy or lease these machines have no access to a final verification process. Even Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify." And we know that the vote count was flipped in 2004. We know it was flipped in Volusia County in 2000.

The Age-Old Question: Is the FBI Dumb or Evil?

I vote for evil.

FBI Admits It Urged Change Of Apple ID Password For Terrorist’s iPhone

The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed soon after the government took possession of the device, Apple, San Bernardino County, and federal officials have acknowledged over the past 48 hours. If that password change hadn’t happened, Apple senior executives said on Friday afternoon, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible. 

The dispute over retrieving the contents from Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone broke into the open earlier this week, part of the government’s investigation into the Dec. 2, 2015, attacks that left 14 dead.  Now, the government, through a court order, is demanding Apple build what the company considers a special backdoor way into the phone — an order that Apple is challenging. The government argues Apple would not be creating a backdoor.

So, I'm sure the FBI is saying that the password change was simply meant to prevent other, undesirable people from getting into the phone, and they didn't realize it would prevent this back-up.

Of course, if the back-up had occurred, then the FBI wouldn't need Apple to devise this hack for the iPhone (that Apple is now being asked to produce). The hack is something the FBI has long wanted and will be great for them to spy on everyone, but bad for everyone else.

So really, changing the password can be seen as a ruse for the FBI to support their demand for the iPhone hack, and was done on purpose.

Even more cynically, you could imagine the FBI changed the password, knowing it would prevent the backup, because they were protecting info in the phone that would incriminate them-- assuming the San Bernardino shooting was a govt op.  And now the FBI is using this excuse of the phone being locked, to force Apple to create a key to unlock all phones.

More News and Interesting Stories

Firm with Saudi Arabian ties works on Air Force One, other VIP jets.

Along with Air Force One, GDC Technics services the E-4B, which serves as an aerial national command post “in case of national emergency or destruction of ground command and control centers,” according to the Air Force. The E-4B is also known as the Doomsday Machine.

Some possible implications for 9/11 here, though supposedly this firm only got control of the contract in 2013. But it still shows the insane level of influence that freaking horrible Saudi Arabia has over the US.

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"How Secretary of State Clinton Enabled the Coup in Honduras"

Today, the rule of law in Honduras still has not recovered from the coup that Secretary Clinton helped enable. That's a key reason that refugees have fled Honduras to the United States, only to find themselves hunted by the Department of Homeland Security raids that Secretary Clinton supported before she opposed them.

Truly horrible what those refugees have gone through, and how Clinton doesn't seem to give one shit about them. Or Obama, for that matter.

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Jewish group attacks York University over ‘anti-Semitic’ move to divest from weapons manufacturers-- Zionist psychopathy on full evil parade.

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NY Times' penetrating look at the heroin epidemic gets the cause and solution all wrong:

It is undeniable: there has been profound, systematic deception by the US government to inflate estimates of the amount of heroin coming from Mexico and Colombia, presumably to conceal the actual origin of most US heroin, and possibly to protect its means of entry into the US. We know where and how to look for heroin. Afghanistan and Myanmar are the world's #1 and #2 producers, accounting for over 95% of world production. Historically, heroin bound for the US leaves these countries by air. There are a manageable number of flights departing Afghanistan and Myanmar. We could put all the needed personnel in place, today, to fully inspect every flight and every airport. The fact that we have looked the other way and pointed in the wrong direction is itself the smoking gun.

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The Malheur Rebellion and Russian Uranium Conspiracy-- this was new to me. But like most right-wing conspiracies, it lacks a certain logical cohesion, and ultimately, it covers up for corporate evil.

The connections between the insurrection and dangerous right-wing groups, religious extremists, and white supremacists have been exposed. The real financial and political interests behind the Malheur insurrection have been clearly revealed by their own activities over the last 6 weeks. They include western state legislators and federal representatives that have an agenda of privatizing public lands so that it would be easier for companies to usurp people from the land - ranchers, dirt-bikers, dirt-bags, or First Peoples - to make way for extractive industries. In the end, the uranium conspiracy theorists and I don’t really have anything in common. It seems in reality, they were simply lied to, fooled, or tricked into dangerous work and rhetoric that didn’t benefit them at all.

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Area 52-- the even more secret government base in Nevada than Area 51.

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In Neanderthals’ DNA, Ancient Humans May Have Left Genetic Mark -- some really recent findings on the origin of modern humans. I'm not sure how it fits into the "aliens engineered humans" conspiracy, but I'm sure some creative conspiracist will come up with a theory.

News Roundup

GOP Traitors: Iran Reveals Republicans Tried To Delay Release Of US Prisoners Until After Election


GOP Insanity: Republicans threaten to keep Supreme Court Vacancy open for one whole Year to prevent Obama Appointee from getting seated. 


Latin American Doctors Suggest Monsanto-Linked Larvicide Cause of Microcephaly, Not Zika Virus


Due Process is Dead: A Staggering 95% of All Inmates in America Have Never Received a Trial

Henry Kissinger Is Still Alive and Still an Evil, Terrible Person

Kudos to Bernie Sanders for bringing it up in the recent debate, and really outlining for a national audience how bad Kissinger was ... excerpt from a good overview by Dan Froomkin:

The late essayist Christopher Hitchins examined Kissinger’s war crimes in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He listed the key elements of his case: 

1. The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina. (his continuing the Vietnam war and the horrific bombing campaigns of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war --ed)

2. Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh. 

3. The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation — Chile — with which the United States was not at war. 

4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus. 

5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor 

6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C. 

Kissinger’s role in the genocide that took place in East Timor is less well-known than the one he enabled in Indochina. Author Charles Glass wrote about that episode in 2011: 

On December 6, 1975, Kissinger and Gerald Ford met President Suharto in Indonesia and promised to increase arms supplies to sustain Indonesian suppression of the former Portuguese colony. Kissinger, quoted verbatim in U.S. Embassy cables of that war council, insisted that American weapons for the Indonesian Army’s invasion could be finessed: “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.” Since no one in East Timor had attacked or intended to attack Indonesia, Suharto could hardly plead self-defense. But Kissinger would make the case for him. All he asked was that Suharto delay the invasion a few hours until he and Ford had left Jakarta. He presumably relied on the American public’s inability to connect the Jakarta conference with the invasion so long as he and Ford were back in Washington when the killing began. As far as the American media went, he was right. The Indonesian Army invaded on the anniversary of a previous day of infamy, December 7, massacring about a third of the population. The press, apart from five Australian journalists whom the Indonesian Army slaughtered, ignored the invasion and subsequent occupation. Well done, Henry. By the time Suharto was overthrown in 1998, Kissinger had gone private — charging vast fees to advise people like Suharto on methods for marketing their crimes. He also kept posing as an elder statesman whose views were sought (and often paid for) by a media that enabled his penchant for self-publicity. 

He was a patriot whose love of country stopped short of taking part in the 9/11 Commission if it meant disclosing how much the Saudi royal family paid him for his counsel. 

The continuing role Kissinger plays in modern foreign policy is perfectly illustrated by Hillary Clinton, his longtime fan and friend. Just recently, in November, she reviewed Kissinger’s latest book, World Order, for the Washington Post. There’s a summary of that here. 

Clinton called it “vintage Kissinger, with his singular combination of breadth and acuity along with his knack for connecting headlines to trend lines.” She wrote that “his analysis, despite some differences over specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.” And she said he came off as “surprisingly idealistic. Even when there are tensions between our values and other objectives, America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the source of legitimacy, not governments alone.” 

A key passage: Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels. Though we have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past, what comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order. 

The difference between the two views of Kissinger is not simply of academic or historical interest. How a presidential candidate feels about him is a clear sign of her or his worldview and indicates the kind of decisions she or he will make in office – and, perhaps even more importantly, suggests the kind of staffers she or he will appoint to key positions of authority in areas of diplomacy, defense, national security, and intelligence. 

Sanders has not made clear who he is turning to for foreign policy advice, if anyone. (What’s your dream foreign policy team? Email me at froomkin@theintercept.com.) 

But Clinton is clearly picking from the usual suspects — the “securocrats in waiting” who make up the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment. 

They work at places like Albright Stonebridge, the powerhouse global consulting firm led by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a staunch Clinton backer. They work at places like Beacon Global Strategies, which is providing high-profile foreign policy guidance to Clinton — as well as to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And they work at places like Kissinger Associates. In fact, Bob Hormats, who was a Goldman Sachs vice chairman before serving as Clinton’s undersecretary of state, is now advising Clinton’s campaign even while serving as the vice chairman of Kissinger Associates. 

Despite the wildly bellicose and human rights-averse rhetoric from the leading Republican presidential candidates, they’re picking from essentially the same pool as well. 

A few weeks ago, I talked to Chas Freeman, the former diplomat I once called a “one-man destroyer of groupthink,” whose non-interventionism and even-handed approach to the Middle East was so un-Kissingeresque that his surprising appointment to President Obama’s National Intelligence Council in 2009 lasted all of a few days. 

He marveled at the lack of any “honest brokers” in the D.C. foreign policy establishment. “We have a foreign policy elite in this country that’s off its meds, basically,” he said. “There’s no debate because everybody’s interventionist, everybody’s militaristic.” They all are pretty much in the thrall of neoconservatism, he said. You can see them “speckled all over the Republican side” and “also in the Clinton group.” 

Henry Kissinger is thus a litmus test for foreign policy. But don’t count on the mainstream media to help you understand that. Imagine two types of people: those who would schmooze with Kissinger at a cocktail party, and those who would spit in his eye. The elite Washington media is almost without exception in that first category. In fact, they’d probably have anyone who spit in Kissinger’s eye arrested. Since they only see one side, they don’t want to get into it. 

And there was a little indicator at Thursday night’s debate, hosted by PBS, of just how eagerly the elite political media welcomes an honest exploration of the subject. Just as Sanders raised the issue of Kissinger’s legacy in Vietnam, either Gwen Ifill or Judy Woodruff — both of whom are very conventional, establishment, Washington cocktail-party celebrities — was caught audibly muttering, “Oh, God.”

The CIA and Regime Change and Sickening Bloodbaths

From Democracy Now! yesterday:

JEFFREY SACHS: ....I would encourage viewers to go back to The New York Times a couple of weeks ago when they unveiled what many of us knew, which was the secret deal of Saudi Arabia and the CIA to fund the destabilization of Syria. That’s who Hillary Clinton sat down with, with the CIA and with Saudi Arabia. And the bloodbath that we have underway right now is irresponsible. And it’s the same kind—

REP. GREGORY MEEKS: Sir, go talk to NATO. Go talk to—

JEFFREY SACHS: And it’s the same—and it’s the same kind of irresponsibility of going in to take out Gaddafi and then leaving a civil war and ISIS in Libya. And it’s the same irresponsibility of going in to take out Saddam Hussein. This is a repeated military-industrial complex, CIA-led coup change. And it’s bipartisan, by the way.

The NYT piece.

Irresponsible, to say the fucking least.

News Roundup

Lots of interesting stuff going on...

Justice Antonin Scalia dead at age 79-- a huge and obnoxious conservative, who blocked a lot of progress on the supreme court.

The So. Cal. Porter Ranch methane leak appears to be plugged for now, though there are methane leaks all over the country that pose environmental problems.

New testimony about the RFK assassination in the Sirhan Sirhan parole hearing.  Clearly, Sirhan did not do it.

Interesting how the Democratic primary is exposing a lot of corruption on the Clinton side.
I have a separate post on the Kissinger-Clinton alliance)

Clinton Emails on Fukushima

Some nice research here:

"Clintons Emails Released Clearly Show She Knew the Dangers to USA from Fukushima and Covered It Up"

I reviewed several thousand Hillary Clinton emails that were released after court order, with an emphasis on Fukushima:

1) She was immediately informed of the dangers of Fukushima, and the actions that people should take to mitigate radiation damage, Mar 12th USA time.

2) She was participating daily in the discussion of Fukushima, until.....

3) They were mostly concerned with economic effects to countries, and to protect the US nuclear industry.

4) Clinton advisers pushed her hard to go to Japan as PR move.

5) At that point one of two things happened a) she stopped sending AND receiving any emails related to Fukushima, or b) she intentionally did not hand over those emails and they were systematically eliminated from her files.

In light of 5a above, what are the chances they everyone in the government stopped sending her updates on Fukushima? Exactly. Of course setting up a trip to Japan to discuss Fukushima would need lots of logistics, talking points, points of contacts, meetings. She did make that infamous trip. So basically Clinton did not supply these!!! 60 top secret email were released to the FBI, BUT the coverup of the Fukushima story was so important that Clinton and her group committed a felony but removing these from the record. It is the only story that makes sense.

This story reminded me of this story about the USS Ronald Reagan, where many soldiers got sick from radiation exposure.

But I doubt Clinton had anything to do with that-- timing is not right, and I don't think she had control over the ship's activities.

On the History of WWI, Zionism and the Khazarian Origin of Jews

Interesting 1961 speech from Benjamin H. Freedman:




Wikipedia lists him as a holocaust denier, though it doesn't have any clear citation to that effect. Oddly, in this speech, he doesn't really discuss the Holocaust at all-- or not to any significant degree.

Freedman is perhaps a bit of crank, as a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and then spent his life strongly promoting Christianity and anti-Communism/anti-Zionism/anti-Judaism.

His ultimate argument in the speech was that Zionists were an evil, barbaric force and that Zionists in the US were promoting WWIII.  If communist/Zionists were promoting WWIII backs in 1961, they were not the only ones, that is for sure. I think his thinking is over-simplified and paranoid.

Still, the history of the Jews and Zionists he goes over is probably accurate, and for sure it is censored by the mainstream.

Obsolete, Triumphalist Militarism Is Destroying America

Really good piece:

Americans call this irregular warfare “terrorism” and see themselves as innocent victims of incomprehensible, mindless violence. But this is what our enemies know: The United States trashed the international rules of war a long while back with its own irregular terrorism, which includes the Army’s Special Forces and the CIA’s secret armies, the sponsored overthrow of selected governments we don’t like, and the assassinations of unfriendly leaders through drone strikes and by other means. When American bombs kill defenseless villagers, we write it off as “collateral damage.” 

The United States cannot win these conflicts, yet it cannot easily get out of them, either. Why not? Because America’s governing elites have declared us the “indispensable nation,” an exceptional status not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions. President Obama has tried to back away from our aggressive posture, promoting diplomacy over armed conflict and making important progress in some areas. But he’s also tried to have it both ways. One day he talks softly, the next day he’s swinging the big stick, personally supervising individual assassination by drone—arguably a crime when soldiers do it. Right-wing warriors ridicule the president’s limp leadership, but what will they say when one day a foreign power decides to murder an American leader? 

(snip) 

The point is, American culture and politics are drenched in warrior celebration. Faith in military might is deeply grounded in the national psyche. After the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we began to see patriotic rituals staged at baseball games and other public events to thank the returning veterans and their families, including the dead and wounded. But thank them for what? For their service and sacrifice, of course. It would have been offensive—unpatriotic—at those commemorations if anyone had talked about the utter failure of these costly wars. Yet even in defeat, the authorities stick to cloying triumphalism and tell stories of American goodness that people long to hear. 

The national dilemma boils down to this: We cannot tell ourselves the truth about who we are and what we have become. In the history of nations, that failure has often led to tragedy.

This dangerous delusion goes and fucking on....

WASHINGTON — President Obama is being pressed by some of his top national security aides to approve the use of American military power in Libya to open up another front against the Islamic State. 

But Mr. Obama, wary of embarking on an intervention in another strife-torn country, has told his aides to redouble their efforts to help form a unity government in Libya at the same time the Pentagon refines its options, which include airstrikes, commando raids or advising vetted Libyan militias on the ground, as Special Operations forces are doing now in eastern Syria. The use of large numbers of American ground troops is not being considered.  

And the madness continues...

Top U.S. military commanders, who only a few months ago were planning to pull the last American troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end, are now quietly talking about an American commitment that could keep thousands of troops in the country for decades. 

The shift in mind-set, made possible by President Obama’s decision last fall to cancel withdrawal plans, reflects the Afghan government’s vulnerability to continued militant assault and concern that terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda continue to build training camps whose effect could be felt far beyond the region, said senior military officials.  

The people of American need to rise up and demand an end to this costly, sick, deluded, EVIL militarism-- so much of it that was started by the sick and evil scam of 9/11.