[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Rule by Theft - Reconstructing the Crime

Sat Nov 13 23:59:48 PST 2004

I hope you all read this. The time for Americans to put up or shut up 
is fast approaching.
If Bush says "I do" for a second time, the need for Gandhi-esque 
non-cooperation and
civil disobedience will begin. Those who go along with Bush will 
forfeit their right to
complain and will get what they deserve - and they'll get it big time!

>
>The Black Commentator
>Issue 113 - November 11, 2004
>
>Rule by Theft - Reconstructing the Crime
>
>Massive irregularities in the November 2 presidential
>vote count "will probably lead to congressional
>hearings in the Committee on the Judiciary," predicts
>Rep. John Conyers, the committee's ranking Democrat and
>longest sitting member of the Congressional Black
>Caucus. If tampering is found, said the Detroit
>lawmaker, "there will be prosecutions" under federal
>law.
>
>Watergate first surfaced as a short, curious story
>about a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, in
>the summer of 1972. A decidedly low-tech crime, the
>Watergate conspiracy unraveled slowly as the Republican
>malefactors turned on each other, finally leaving their
>president naked to the world, disgraced. The Great Vote
>Theft of 2004, on the other hand, was in part a series
>of high-tech crimes against numbers - felonies designed
>to leave no physical trace, but which are evident
>through the patterns created by the perpetrators.
>Squads of dedicated sleuths are on the case - some of
>them at the top of their technical game - assembling
>data to reveal tell-tale patterns of massive vote
>fraud. There may soon be compelling circumstantial
>evidence of how the crimes were committed and, by
>deduction, the identity of the conspirators.
>
>But first, Rep. Conyers and five congressional
>colleagues have to make sure the evidence doesn't
>disappear quicker than John Kerry's projected lead in
>the exit polls. On November 8, Conyers wrote his second
>letter to the U.S. Comptroller General, requesting that
>the non-partisan General Accounting Office "immediately
>undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting
>machines and new technologies used in the 2004
>election, how election officials responded to
>difficulties they encountered and what can we do in the
>future to improve our election systems and
>administration." Time is of the essence because "[t]
>here is substantial concern that much of the primary
>evidence needed to evaluate these allegations will not
>be preserved without immediate action." Conyers fears
>"this evidence can be moved or changed."
>
>Joined by fellow CBC members Robert C. Scott (D-VA) and
>Melvin Watt (D-NC), and Representatives Jerrold Nadler
>(D-NY), Robert Wexler (D-FL) and Rush Holt (D-NJ),
>Conyers pointed to the "more than 30,000 complaints"
>registered at the Election Incident Reporting Service
>(EIRS) and "265 specific complaints" listed at the
>Voters Unite! site. "We continue to receive additional
>reports every minute and will transmit additional
>information as it becomes available," the legislators
>wrote.
>
>Punk Press
>
>The corporate media, who disavowed their own exit polls
>when the numbers came out "wrong" (Kerry leading) on
>Election Day, are institutionally invested in the
>legitimacy of George Bush's presidency. "I was tipped
>off by a person very high up in TV that the news has
>been locked down tight, and there will be no TV
>coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2,"
>wrote Bev Harris, head of Black Box Voting and veteran
>mover-and-shaker on the dangers of electronic ballots.
>"Even the journalists are pretty horrified. My source
>said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even
>on their own time, and he was calling from somewhere
>else. He was trying to figure out how to get the real
>news out on vote fraud. This is a person I've worked
>with off and on for nearly two years, and the voice was
>so somber it really bothered me."
>
>Harris posted her online warning in the wee hours of
>November 8. But later that day, the wall of corporate
>media collaboration cracked a bit, when MSNBC Countdown
>host Keith Olbermann presented 16 minutes of straight-
>up reporting on a range of vote irregularities in Ohio,
>Florida and elsewhere, capped by an interview with
>Congressman Conyers. The real domestic Story of the
>Century had "legs" - finally. If Conyers can expand and
>maintain his congressional Coalition of the Unwilling
>through to the hearings that he is entitled by rank to
>conduct, even the craven corporate media will find it
>difficult to dismiss the "conspiracy theorists."
>Literally hundreds of reporters are aware in detail of
>the real conspiracy - the late night decision to
>validate the craziest election numbers in modern times
>- and some of them have a conscience.
>
>Conyers is compelled to go through the motions of
>requesting help from the General Accounting Office,
>which is obligated to assist the Congress in carrying
>out its duties. However, the true engines of resistance
>to Bush's crime accompli are the grassroots
>investigators, technicians and numbers crunchers busily
>in search of patterns of anomalies in the corrupted
>election returns - numbers that should not be there -
>and answers to how the tallies might have been
>engineered. These are the people who will craft the
>technical indictment against the Bush men. Bev Harris
>is at the center of the rebellion. On Monday she
>renewed her call for "lawyers, computer people,
>statisticians" and "funds to pay for copies of the
>evidence." For non-specialists, Harris has other
>assignments:
>
>   "Discrepancies please, and hurry. E-mail them to
>   tips at blackboxvoting.org . Pass the word. Need
>   source documents, too. ASAP. Follow your nose, or
>   join the Black Box Scavenger Hunt: Pick a county.
>   Look at small counties, as we are seeing many
>   discrepancies in those. Look in any state. Get the
>   official number of registered voters, Dem and
>   Republican. Get the number of votes cast on Nov. 2,
>   Republican and Dem. Make a grid like this."
>
>Harris is looking forward to putting Republicans in the
>dock. "We are working now to compile the proof, based
>not on soft evidence - red flags, exit polls - but core
>documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most
>massive Freedom of Information action in history," she
>wrote. There are "strong indications that both Florida
>and Ohio would be flipped if election manipulations are
>rolled back. Some indication that fraud may have
>occurred in at least 30 states."
>
>Power trumps exit polls
>
>It may be possible to mortally wound the Bush
>administration without "flipping" the election - a tall
>order. If "at least 30 states" were subjected to GOP
>fraud, then hundreds of individual operatives were
>involved in the crimes. The more perpetrators, the
>better the fishing. Untying one knot could cause the
>whole conspiracy to unravel in a chaos of
>recriminations and crime-compounding cover-ups.
>Remember Watergate.
>
>The networks, the "horse race" impresarios who fed the
>public a daily campaign diet of dueling polls rather
>than issues and facts, have disgraced themselves in
>their eagerness to discredit the Mother of All
>Political Surveys, the presidential exit polls. This is
>their Electiongate, too. The aborted November 2 exit
>poll finally engaged 150,000 real voters, face to face,
>about a subject they cared enough about to show up for:
>voting. The usual commercial poll involves 800 to 1500
>respondents, drawn from the dwindling minority of
>people who agree to speak to pollsters on the phone -
>sometimes as few as 20 percent of those called.
>
>(Black Commentator calculated that Kerry was penalized up to three
>percentage points by flawed commercial polls in the
>lead-up to the election, especially the Gallup Poll,
>whose electoral model projected that Blacks would make
>up only 7.5 percent of the turnout. Black participation
>had hovered around 10 percent in the last two
>presidential elections, and reached 11 percent in
>2004.When the exit polls came in, we felt vindicated.)
>
>Morally challenged but professionally competent former
>Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris got it right before
>(like John Kerry) he got it wrong: "That an exit poll
>is always right is an axiom of politics. It is easier
>to assume that a compass is not pointing north than to
>assume that an exit poll is incorrect. It takes a
>deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll
>wrong. Since the variables of whether or not a person
>will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it
>is like peeking at the answer before taking the test,"
>said Morris, correctly. Then he flipped out. "But these
>exit polls were wrong. And the fact that they were so
>totally, disastrously wrong is a national scandal.
>There should be a national investigation to unearth the
>story behind the bias."
>
>Amazing. Like the networks, Morris cannot acknowledge
>the truth that is obvious to Black voters everywhere.
>Since official returns must be right, he reasons, the
>exit polls must have been rigged. Who was the puppeteer
>of hundreds of exit pollsters at locations all across
>the country? Dick Morris doesn't say. Because there is
>nothing to say.
>
>David Swanson, former spokesman for the Dennis Kucinich
>presidential campaign and now media coordinator for the
>AFL-CIO associated International Labor Communications
>Association (ILCA), notes that
>
>   "the exit polls were accurate within their margin
>   of error in many states but were surprisingly far
>   off in a number of swing states, and always off in
>   the same direction, showing more support for Kerry
>   than was found in the official counts. Warren
>   Mitofsky, co-director of the National Election
>   Pool, told the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that
>   'Kerry was ahead in a number of states by margins
>   that looked unreasonable to us.' Mitofsky
>   speculated that perhaps more Kerry voters were
>   willing to participate in the exit poll, but did
>   not suggest any reason for that speculation other
>   than the difference between the exit polls and the
>   final counts."
>
>As Swanson says, it's all "circular reasoning" - an
>attempt to avoid the obvious, and all the more
>maddeningly ironic since, by Dick Morris's reasoning,
>Mitofsky is the guy best-placed to "rig" the exit polls
>in Kerry's favor. Instead, he ordered them shut down,
>for presidential choice purposes. Swanson's article
>cites University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven F.
>Freeman, whose November 9 study of the exit poll and
>official tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania
>finds the figures totally incompatible. "The likelihood
>of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring
>together is in the order of one-in-a-million. The odds
>of all three occurring together are 250 million to
>one," the MIT Ph.D calculated. "As much as we can say
>in social science that something is impossible, it is
>impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and
>actual vote counts in the three critical battleground
>states of the 2004 election could have been due to
>chance or random error."
>
>Day-long Hell
>
>Somebody's figures are bogus in all three states, and
>for much of the nation at large. The conspirators are
>the same people who, as crusading journalist Greg
>Palast regularly documents, have made vote theft an
>institutional crime - that is, Republicans (and others)
>steal Black votes with such regularity through both
>legal and informal means that their crime sprees have
>grown to seem much like weather. (See "Kerry Won,"
>TomPaine.com, November 4.) Count Every Vote 2004
>documented hundreds of voting irregularities in seven
>southern states, typically involving "faulty equipment
>and sub-par facilities in some poor neighborhoods
>[that] contributed to possible voter
>disenfranchisement."
>
>The digital vote tricksters are the same people who
>created a day-long Hell for voters in the mostly Black
>Broward County, Florida precinct where Marsha Johnson,
>an African American attorney from New York City, was
>assigned as a voter protection volunteer:
>
>   "I saw an incompetent poll clerk telling
>   approximately 1 in every 5 registered voters (who
>   voted at the very same polling place last year and
>   who's voter registration cards indicated that they
>   were at the correct polling site) that they had
>    mysteriously been 'reassigned' to other sites but
>   failing to tell them where to go, or worse, giving
>   them incorrect information."
>
>And so on, at thousands of locations, thefts of awesome
>dimensions and howling arrogance - the humiliation of
>African Americans in order to secure George Bush
>another chance to destroy the planet.
>
>Yet, in the continental insane asylum that (white)
>Manifest Destiny has made of America, this is only
>"soft" evidence of crime, as Bev Harris correctly notes
>in her summons for a posse to corral the electronic
>ballot stuffers and stealers. The "soft" crimes of 2000
>were repeated with a vengeance in 2004, and there is no
>reason to expect the system to respond any differently
>this time around. Exit polls are "soft" too: they only
>point us to the methodology of the criminal, who must
>be ensnared in the provable act of ballot tampering - a
>"hard" crime.
>
>John Maxwell, the esteemed Jamaican activist, educator
>and journalist, sees the United States much more
>clearly from Kingston than ABC's Peter Jennings does
>through his teleprompter. The U.S. corporate media got
>whiplash disassociating themselves from their own very
>expensive exit polls. Many lost their composure in
>trying to acclimate to the new corporate line, that
>voters had "swung" from Kerry to Bush in the latter
>hours of Election Day - a totally counter-intuitive
>proposition when considering that Black and poor folks
>vote late. "But there was no swing," wrote Maxwell.
>"According to one exit pollster, both candidates
>retained 90 per cent of their party's 2000 voters. So
>the swing came in the computers. In Florida people
>complained that their votes were recorded for Bush
>although they had voted for Kerry."
>
>Hard evidence
>
>On January 6, the United States Senate will once again
>be called upon to say "Yes" or "No" to the verdict of
>the Electoral College. Four years ago, as millions were
>reminded in Michael Moore's movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11,"
>20 members of the Congressional Black Caucus rose to
>ask that at least one Senator raise his or her voice to
>object to awarding Florida's stolen electoral votes to
>George W. Bush. Not one Senator spoke up. Apparently,
>the evidence was too "soft."
>
>This year, the Bush men reached into the voting
>machinery to alter the results of the election in a
>large number of jurisdictions, apparently adding lots
>more votes than they subtracted. The Republican
>operatives and their handlers need to do "hard" time,
>and be forced to trade in their co-conspirators up and
>down the line, like other criminals. The patterns and
>sources of the Great Vote Theft of 2004 may well be
>discerned in the coming weeks. No hand is truly unseen.
>
>Richard Nixon didn't personally plan the Watergate
>break-in - his subordinates did. However, two years of
>lying about the crime so thoroughly discredited Tricky
>Dick that he found it necessary to resign. We at Black
>Commentator doubt that George Bush knew the details of
>his henchmen's high- and low-tech election crime wave
>- why would anybody tell that fool anything? - and we
>would be surprised if the evidence pattern reveals enough
>purloined votes to reverse the results of November 2.
>But fixing elections is a crime, and covering up a
>crime is a bigger felony, as Nixon's crew discovered.
>If Conyers and Bev Harris and squadrons of citizens run
>their show right, we may at least look forward to four
>years of a once-again "illegitimate" Bush presidency.
>With luck, we might even send Karl Rove to prison.
>
>At any rate, it will be good to have the hounds yelping
>at the "master's" heels, for a change.
>
>Next week: Black relations with the Democratic Party
>are at a turning point, but not towards the GOP.
>
>www.blackcommentator.com
>
>http://www.blackcommentator.com/113/113_cover_stolen_election.html
>
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand