i say a little prayer for you.

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life in liberated afghanistan

http://www.myafghan.com/news2.asp?id=1630208599

KABUL: Villagers in southern Afghanistan hid their Qurans and other religious items because they were afraid US soldiers would kill them if they discovered they were Muslim, a US military spokesman said yesterday. "The village of Atel Mohammed removed all of their religious items, including the Quran, from the village before Special Operations Forces and the Afghan military force arrived," Col. Rodney Davis said in a statement issued from Bagram, the US military headquarters... "The elder stated that some of the villagers felt that the Americans would kill them for being Muslims and these religious items were proof of their faith," Davis said. The soldiers sought to dispel their concerns, he said.

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http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1058868217103&p=1012571727102

Prominent members of the Afghan government and warlords supported by the US are implicated in "violent criminal offences" including robbery, extortion, rape and kidnapping, a leading human rights watchdog has said. In a report released on Tuesday, Human Rights Watch says abuses have created a "climate of fear" that threatens to derail the debate over a new constitution and plans for elections, due to be held in June 2004.

...The report points to Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the intractable and powerful defence minister, and Yunis Qanooni, education minister, as controlling military commanders or intelligence operatives who allegedly harass and threaten outspoken journalists or political rivals. Marshal Fahim and Mr Qanooni are members of the Northern Alliance, which helped oust the Taliban in 2001 and was rewarded with key government posts.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54072-2003Jul27.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 27 -- A $1 billion aid package that the Bush administration plans to propose soon [note: "plans" to "propose" "soon" --mrs. h] will help war-shattered Afghanistan rebuild the peace... The money will be spent largely on projects to reconstruct infrastructure such as roads and schools; the efforts are designed to have a significant and rapid impact on people's daily lives. The money also will fund training for police nationwide as well as for soldiers of the Afghan army. Nearly two years after the U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban regime -- and pledged to help rebuild Afghanistan -- much of the country and the economy remain shattered [and so on].

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meet donald kay-- the guy recently recently hired to produce weapons of mass destruction in iraq-- and his pals

http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/4430

1983-1988: Kay worked under Ronald Reagan as a chief scientist in the Pentagon.

1983-1992: Kay was on the staff of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under the direction of Hans Blix. Both Reagan and Bush I sought an excuse to invade oil-rich Iraq, and viewed 'evidence' of nukes the best motivator for the American public. Blix, however, was a man of integrity who could not be bought, and refused to be pressured, marking him forever as an 'enemy' of the Neocon hawks...

1990-1991: ...According to ex-CIA agents from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, "On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed '120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.' But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president’s claim, it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to this day."

1990-1992: ...Bush seeks to gain stature in the run up to election 1992 by magnifying, retroactively, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. David Kay is named to head UNSCOM's nuke search. One of the other inspectors on UNSCOM's teams was biological weapons expert [and recent suicide] David Kelly. Kay's job: go into Kuwait and Iraq and produce evidence of WMDs . Kay now claims Saddam had a 'horrifyingly' huge WMD program, including nukes in the making - that he had been, in fact, just MONTHS away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon... Much of Kay's case relied on cutting tenuous deals with Iraqi "scientists" of dubious credentials and CIA operatives and with producing astoundingly (insanely, in fact) detailed documents on the alleged weapons program that had just been left laying conveniently around.. He is removed from his position with the UN for his unethical behavior.

1995: The IAEA reveals that documents supplied to them earlier by [Kay source] Khirid Hamza, who claimed to be a key scientist on Sadam's nuclear program, were faked.

1992-2002: ...Kay begins to make the lecture circuit, whipping up the case against Saddam Hussein.

1993-2002: ...Kay becomes the VP of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the same company that Stephen Hatfill, a WMD expert, worked for until March 2002.

Fall 2001:SAIC is commissioned by the Pentagon to create a replica of a mobile WMD "laboratory", alleged to have been used by Saddam... The Pentagon claims the trailer is to be used as a training aide for teams seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though Afghanistan had not yet been invaded. The primary designer/advisor of the replica? Stephen Hatfill.

Early 2002: ...Stephen Hatfill becomes a "person of interest" to the FBI in the anthrax case... Hatfill is put in a position of never being able to creditably reveal any potentially damning information on the activities of SAIC or the Pentagon to light... SAIC fires Hatfill as a 'liability.'

March 2002: the Bush administration awards SAIC a massive defense contract, potentially worth at least $1 billion.

October 2002: Kay leaves SAIC and becomes a 'senior fellow' at the Potomac Institute for Policy Research, where he is thus positioned to become an 'objective expert' for nuclear weapons for the Bush administration in its run up to the war. In all of Kay's citations in the news and before interviews, he is invariably referred to as "David Kay, former chief UN weapons inspector and senior fellow at the Potomac Instsitute for Policy Research." The SAIC connection is neatly omitted.

Sept. 2002: Khidir Hamza is brought in by the Bush administration to testify before Congress to whom he makes a long list of allegations, including Saddam's closeness to weapons production, his ties to Al Queda, etc. Despite Hamza's earlier exposure as a liar, his testimony was still taken seriously by Congress and the media.

February 2003: ...The Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council is created. A disproportionate number of the "Iraqi nationals" on this council are employees of SAIC,. including Khidir Hamza.

May 2003: Khidir Hamza is sent by the Pentagon to Iraq to head the nuclear industry there.

June and early July 2003: Pressure on Bush to find WMD 'evidence' grows... He has hired David Kay to lead a team of inspectors in Iraq to produce evidence of WMDs, including nukes.

July 18: David Kelly, former member of UNSCOM who has been to Iraq 37 times on weapons inspections and was believed to be in the process of presenting evidence that showed that Blair doctored his "Iraq dossier," is found dead.

[see also] David Kay Comments at Middle East Institute in 1997 when still VP of SAIC, http://www.wrmea.com/Washington-Report_org/www/backissues/0497/9704057a.html

[and also] A Detailed, Highly researched "dossier" on David Kay, http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:s-R1uOZk048J:xymphora.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_xymphora_archive.html+%22David+Kay%22+SAIC&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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more ancient history

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51085-2003Jul26?language=printer

Richard M. Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex. Jeb Stuart Magruder -- then a "callow" campaign aide, now a retired Presbyterian minister in Ohio -- says in a new documentary for PBS that he heard Nixon's voice on a telephone as the president instructed then-Attorney General John N. Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in. 'John . . . you need to do that,' Magruder said he heard Nixon say at the end of a phone call in which Mitchell discussed the matter with his boss.

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these financial times

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1058868181255&p=1012571727172

US and foreign companies are coming under scrutiny for their dealings with states deemed by Washington to be sponsors of terrorism... Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican and chair of the House sub-committee on the Middle East and Central Asia, is leading efforts to pass legislation that would tighten existing sanctions against Iran and Libya, and close loopholes that allow the foreign subsidiaries of US companies to do business with Iran. The legislation would amend the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act ("Ilsa") which empowers the president to punish non-US companies investing more than $20,000,000.00 in the energy sectors of the two countries... The separate Syrian Accountability Act, also under consideration, would seek to check the growing business links between the US and Syria... Congressional staffers say there is also discussion of blacklisting foreign and US businesses involved with Iran with the intention of preventing them from securing US-funded contracts in Iraq. Such a list was drawn up in the Pentagon this year but not implemented.

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http://www.disinfo.com/site/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=164&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Outspoken Pentagon advisor Richard Perle recently called for Iraq's debt to be cancelled as a way of teaching banks about the "moral hazard of . . . lend[ing] to a vicious dictatorship." ...A war profiteer like Perle lecturing on morality is doubtful enough, but who in today's occupied Iraq will really profit from debt forgiveness, the Iraqi people or companies like Halliburton? At stake is more than $184,000,000,000.00 of pending contracts and debts against Iraq, many of which transpired before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In other words, even deals inked when Saddam Hussein was considered a US ally could now be considered odious debt. No small coincidence that the countries slated to lose most from an Iraqi write-off include Russia, France and Germany: Bush's axis-of-just-as-evil for opposing the recent invasion of Iraq.

...Who really benefits from massive cash infusions to Iraq, estimated to be costing US taxpayers $3,900,000,000.00 every month? And who would benefit from a hasty write-off of Iraq's past debt? ...Not everybody's hurting. Halliburton, the Texan oil company tied to US vice president Dick Cheney, is making a killing on subsidiary contracts to Iraq, doing everything from repairing oil wells to providing housing for US troops. Corporate cronies will also benefit from Bush Administration plans to privatize Iraq's 100 state-owned firms... No doubt the lack of financial transparency in today's Iraq creates unprecedented opportunities. Some US firms have already been charged with bilking millions of dollars in bogus rebuilding contracts, while the integrity of the US-UK controlled fund slated to recover foreign Iraqi assets has been called into question.

Clearly, throwing more cash into this mess makes no sense. How long can US taxpayers shoulder the unilateral burden? What new dictators will be propped up? What assets and national resources will be privatized away from the Iraqi people without their consent? How long before they negate today's agreements as odious? Bottom line, until a stable government is in place, truly representative of the Iraqi people, there should be no debt cancellations - reschedulings or delayed payment allowances perhaps, but no write-offs. Same goes for privatizations. The Bush Administration's secretive, unilateral and unaccountable approach to finances is among our biggest moral hazards in Iraq.

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more statesmanship

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/07/lessing-b-07-21.html

QUITO, Ecuador -- Give it to the members of Bush's foreign-policy team: They certainly aren't loafers. While American citizens spent the days leading up to July 4 stocking up on burgers and bottle rockets, the Bush administration was hard at work offending 35 of our remaining military allies and removing any annoying last traces of international credibility we might still have had.

On July 1, the White House unexpectedly announced that it would be immediately cutting off all military aid to certain countries unless their leaders signed bilateral agreements guaranteeing the total immunity of all Americans (military and civilian) before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This bald-faced threat does not, of course, apply to our NATO allies (none of whom signed such agreements) or to other major aid recipients such as Japan, Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

Besides a handful of African and ex-communist nations, the list of countries that do have to comply reads like an atlas of Central and South America: Belize, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru and Colombia, to name a few. What these countries have in common are long-standing military alliances and cooperation agreements with the United States, large foreign debts and related economic problems, and, perhaps most importantly, no effective regional association such as the European Union or the Arab League with which to formulate a common response to American bullying.

...The court now has some 90 member states, and about 50 other nations have become signatories to the Rome Statute (the ICC's founding document), though have not ratified it. The ICC also boasts a recently appointed chief prosecutor and a panel of 18 judges (including seven women). The court's mandate -- to provide a permanent tribunal for prosecution of war criminals and perpetrators of genocide, and to counter the immunity they all too frequently enjoy in their home countries -- has found widespread support around the globe... For internationalists, it is one of the most exciting and promising efforts of the last 50 years.

...Why would a country that has ratified the Rome Statute, submitting its own citizens, military and judicial system to the court's jurisdiction (on the supposition that all other member states would similarly acknowledge that jurisdiction), grant blanket immunity to the citizens and soldiers of another country? ...What kind of international court has jurisdiction over the citizens of every country except one?

...In a way, though, the Bush administration has matured. Its freshman-year tantrum over the Kyoto Protocol and its sophomoric performance at the United Nations leading up to our invasion of Iraq have given way to a more confident, upperclassman-style hazing of its weaker, smaller brothers. Humiliating our own allies may seem counterproductive (not to mention just plain surly), but it fits into a larger strategy for remaking the way the United States relates to the rest of the world... The whole affair sheds a little more light on just what kind of world the neocons are intent on building.

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the wit and wisdom of paul wolfowitz.

http://www.bestoftheblogs.com/

"When that regime is removed we will find one of the most talented populations in the Arab world, perhaps complaining that it took us so long to get there. Perhaps a little unfriendly to the French for making it take so long. But basically welcoming us as liberators. Then it's up to us to behave as liberators, and I'm sure we will." February 19, 2003

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." February 27, 2003

"It was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting, fighting what has been sometimes called a guerrilla war." July 23, 2003

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=428886

America's desire to rebuild Iraq in its own image even extends to setting up a mobile phone network that only works for US phones. A Bahraini company that established a network accessible to those without American phones has been forced to scrap its plans after a week. Batelco had started placing more than $5m (£3m) of aerials and other equipment for GSM mobiles across Baghdad... But mindful of its desire to set up a tender for the country's mobile network, the US authorities apparently started to put pressure on Batelco, threatening to confiscate its equipment. "They applied enough pressure for us to push the button," said Rashid al-Snan, the company's regional operations manager.

...The US-led authority in Iraq wants to hold a tender for three regional mobile phone licences - almost certain to be one of the most lucrative contracts in post-Saddam Iraq... A decision has not yet been taken on whether the mobile network should use GSM technology - used in Europe, the Middle East and many other parts of the world - or the American CDMA technology, which is only used in the US.

...The provisional authority declined to comment on the alleged threats to Batelco.

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http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/29-7-19103-0-41-39.html

BRITISH troops have been flown home from Iraq as casualties of the heat amid claims they are being forced to live in squalid conditions... A corporal [said]: "If you can't sleep because of the heat, your efficiency and general health decline rapidly. People are in a state of collapse after three or four days. Most of us are still 'bird-bathing' in water from bowser trucks poured into metal or plastic basins. The chemical Portaloos are unusable between eleven in the morning and five at night. They become individual ovens, stinking and filled with flies." A Scottish private said: "The biggest problem is having to get at least 10 litres of water down your neck every day to avoid dehydration. None of it is cool. Most of it is blood temperature."

...An MoD spokeswoman said: "Given the extreme conditions temperature-wise in Iraq, we're doing the very best we can. We are constantly trying to improve living conditions. It all takes time." The ministry had no comment on the evacuation of heat casualties.

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1504&ncid=1504&e=6&u=/afp/20030729/bs_afp/britain_oil_company_030729110603

LONDON - British oil giant BP reported a 42-percent rise in second-quarter profits, boosted by unexpectedly strong oil prices in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29WIRE-PENT.html?ex=1060494220&ei=1&en=52bf6985b786d2f2

The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said today that the program would be dropped.

...The discarded program was met with astonishment and derision almost from the moment it was disclosed. In the proposed futures market, traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel, say, or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have had the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Pentagon called the idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." But the two Democratic senators who disclosed the plan on Monday called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.

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http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-loot29jul29,0,2643873.story

QARA QUOSH, Iraq — Pentagon strategists have a vision of a new Iraqi army that is well-trained, disciplined and welcomed by those it protects. The residents of this village in northern Iraq have memories of a very different army. And they're taking no chances. For decades, villagers say, the Iraqi army and despised paramilitaries loyal to Saddam Hussein terrorized them... When the soldiers fled as Hussein's regime fell, town officials installed a volunteer guard around the base to ward off looters. They wanted to use it as a youth recreation center. But when town fathers heard reports that the Americans wanted to use the base to train a new Iraqi army, the security guards were withdrawn and the word went out: Tear it down.

..."We don't want to relive the bad history," said Louis Qassab, the Catholic priest who oversees both the civic and religious affairs of this predominantly Christian town. "God gave us the gift of forgetting. We want to forget what happened here before. "If there is a military base here, the Americans will not have liberated us," Qassab added.

Iraqis here and elsewhere fear a new state security force, and their attitude illustrates one of the greatest difficulties the U.S.-led occupation forces face in stabilizing the country and shifting responsibility back to Iraqis. Many residents don't trust their own countrymen... [and so on.]

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http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/6412161.htm

WASHINGTON - Assets seized from the Iraqi government should be used to rebuild the country and not to compensate 17 Americans held captive in Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge Tuesday... The ex-POWs brought their case under a law that allows such lawsuits by American victims of torture or other abuses by agents of countries on the State Department's list of nations that sponsor terror.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54345-2003Jul27.html

BAGHDAD -- Over the past six weeks a small but intense war has been conducted in the mud-hut villages and lush palm groves along the Tigris River valley... The U.S. Army adopted a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries and found new ways to gather intelligence about them... Thousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained... in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night... Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info."

...On June 7, a patrol of U.S. military police drove into the town of Thuluya, on a big bend in the Tigris River southeast of Tikrit. Iraqis there told them to leave, and warned that if they came back, they would be killed, said a U.S. commander. It was then that "we started to kick down doors," recalled a senior Central Command official.

..."When you have one operation after another, there is a cumulative effect," the Army official said. [and so on.]

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http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=255167〈=e&dir=news

In his first interview with a British newspaper for five years, [Hizbullah leader] Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah rejected Washington’s classification of his group as a "terrorist organization," saying that the Bush Administration did not possess the moral authority to define terrorism... According to Sheikh Nasrallah, it is the Bush Administration that is the real terrorist organization. “We believe that the American Administration has always exercised terrorist and aggressive policies and backed terrorist groups and regimes,” he said, citing the training of Osama bin Laden and his fighters by the CIA against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. “The chemical weapons used by the Iraqis against Iranian forces in al-Faw peninsula and in Halabja were provided by the Americans,” he added. “The American Administration is a sponsor of terrorism, so ethically and legally it is not qualified to categorise terrorism.”

During the interview, Sheikh Nasrallah delivered a clear warning that Hizbullah would fight back if it felt that its survival was in jeopardy. “In such a case Hizbullah has a right to defend its existence, its people and its country through any means and at any time and in any place,” he warned. [but that's so... pre-emptive! --mrs.h]

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http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20030727_159.html

KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops opened fire in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala on Sunday as stone-throwing Iraqis protested over Marines killing a man the day before. A U.S. Marine officer told Reuters his men returned fire [note: bullets for rocks isn't really a "return" of fire --mrs.h] in self-defense.

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see photo of g.i.'s bravely defending parking spaces in baghdad

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030727/168/4t39y.html

[caption] U.S. troops arrest a driver as they enforce a no-parking rule near the main train station Baghdad, Iraq .

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1006180,00.html

Japan took its biggest stride yet from half a century of pacifism yesterday when parliament approved the dispatch of troops to support the US in Iraq. The prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, overrode opposition, a no-confidence motion and a late-night filibuster to ensure the passage of the legislation, which paves the way for the country's biggest military deployment since the second world war.

Never before has Japan sent forces overseas without a UN mandate... No Japanese soldier has fired a gun in combat since 1945, nor have any of them been killed in action... Under the new law, however, 1,000 personnel from the self-defence force - Japan's army - will be dispatched into a conflict. Instead of being neutral UN peacekeepers in a ceasefire, Japanese soldiers will join a US-led occupying army trying to quell a guerrilla war.

...Under article nine of its war-renouncing constitution, Japan theoretically rejects the use of force to settle international disputes. But Mr Koizumi and his predecessors have steadily eroded the significance of this document.

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http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1058868215878&p=1012571727169

Mitsubishi, Japan's largest trading company, concluded an agreement on Monday to buy crude oil from Iraq, in a sign that Japanese companies may reap commercial rewards for their country's backing of the war... Industry analysts said the deal's significance for Mitsubishi and other Japanese companies outweighed the size of the contract. The deal could open the way for more Japan-Iraq contracts and help Japan in its pursuit of alternative sources of oil.

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http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=267735

BAGHDAD — A Japanese reporter was manhandled and temporarily detained by U.S. soldiers Sunday for filming without their permission in an area of Baghdad where they were conducting raids, another reporter who accompanied him said.Japan Press reporter Kazutaka Sato, 47, was put in a hold, thrown to the ground and kicked, sustaining injuries to his face and hands, according to Mika Yamamoto, 36, a Japan Press reporter who was with Sato at the time of the incident. She said the two had been in the Mansur district of Baghdad filming the damage caused to civilians by the U.S. military when they had their cameras confiscated... The soldiers did not explain why photography was forbidden in the area.

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http://www.greenwichtime.com/business/investing/sns-ap-venezuela-iraq-opec,0,1853891.story?coll=sns-ap-investing-headlines

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela, which opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, won't recognize Iraq's delegation to an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting July 31, the oil minister said Friday. Rafael Ramirez said no Iraqi official would be allowed to attend any OPEC meeting until an "internationally recognized" government is in place.

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let's review

http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.html

ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia may not be household names like Enron or Arthur Andersen, but these three companies will decide America's next president. In the 2004 presidential election, the full effect of electronic voting will be felt for the first time and these are the companies that will report the majority of the results.

...To understand how George W. Bush will win the next presidential election, it helps to understand how he won the last one... The root of the problem has been overlooked. As investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovered, the state of Florida purged over 90,000 people from their list of eligible voters under the guise that they were felons. In fact, almost none of the disenfranchised voters were felons, but almost all were blacks or democrats.

Palast's investigation revealed that at the heart of this ethnic cleansing of voter lists was the creation of a new centralized database for the state of Florida. In 1999, the state fired the company they were paying to compile their "scrub" lists and gave the job to Database Technologies (DBT, now ChoicePoint). DBT, a private firm known to have strong Republican ties, was paid $2,300,000.00 to do the same job that had previously been done for $5,700.00.

The first list of felons from DBT included 8,000 names of felons from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials [??! -mrs.h]. The state government said they were all felons, and thus barred from voting under federal law. Local officials complained about the list and DBT issued a new one, this time naming 58,000 felons.

Palast discovered that the one county that went through the process of checking the new list name by name found it was 95% wrong. Because of the way DBT compiled its erroneous list, Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons were barred from voting. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voters John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels. DBT didn't get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, but they were matched for race, so a felon named Joe Green only knocked off a black Joe Green, but not a white person with the same name. There was no need to guess about the race of the disenfranchised: a voter's race is listed next to his or her name in many Southern states including Florida because racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

DBT's fee of $2.3 million was supposed to include verification that the individuals on their list were actually felons, but Palast's investigation showed that DBT could not provide any evidence that they made a single phone call to verify the identity of the names scrubbed prior to the 2000 Presidential Election.

...The new Help America Vote Act (HAVA) demands that every state replicate Florida's system of centralized, computerized voter files before the 2004 election, presumably to avoid the paper-ballot confusion of the Florida recount... ChoicePoint [formerly DBT] already has contracts with numerous states to provide electronic voter lists purged of supposed felons. They are a natural choice as one of the U.S.'s largest database companies. ChoicePoint provides information on federal criminal records by district for 43 states and also provides online access to more than 63 million criminal records for all fifty states.

...An even more serious problem lies inside the voting machines themselves... Dr. Rebecca Mercuri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College and has been referred to as "the leading independent expert on electronic voting technology." Shortly before the 2000 Presidential election, Mercuri defended her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks and Balances" at the Engineering School of the University of Pennsylvania... One of Mercuri's primary concerns is that electronic systems provide no way for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds to the vote being recorded. As Mercuri notes on her site, "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result." There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. Companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, which manufacture the machines and provide the code that runs them, simply take a "trust us" approach. Mercuri also reports that no electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards such as the ISO Common Criteria, nor are they required to comply with such standards. Thus, no current electronic voting system is secure by the U.S. government's own standards.

...Computer glitches are already cropping up all across the United States... In Georgia, which recently purchased 22,000 Diebold touch screens, some voters touched one candidate's name on the screen and saw another candidate's name appear. A former news reporter in Florida discovered that votes were being tabulated in 644 Palm Beach precincts: but Palm Beach only has 643 precincts... In North Carolina, a software programming error caused vote-counting machines to skip over several thousand votes, both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the election. In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes... A report from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project states that an estimated 1.5 million presidential votes were not recorded in 2000 because of difficulties using voting equipment and that electronic machines have the second highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots in presidential, Senate, and governor elections over the last 12 years.

[see also http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5054088.html]

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another example of floridian technological advances

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/6361627.htm

Surveillance cameras at Miami-Dade's juvenile lockup that would have shed light on the agonizing final days of 17-year-old Omar Paisley, who died June 9 of a ruptured appendix, will apparently provide no useful information to investigators. Cameras at the 226-bed Regional Juvenile Detention Center never worked properly since their installation nearly a decade ago, according to Department of Juvenile Justice records obtained by The Herald. Although they allow real-time monitoring, they don't record. The department has sought to replace the equipment since 1998 but was never given the money.

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don't worry, be happy

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-cpfig23jul23,0,7664502.story?coll=sfla-news-broward

Florida's juvenile justice chief on Tuesday declared the state's only maximum-security prison for girls safe -- less than a week after sending in an emergency team of state experts to evaluate the 100-bed facility. Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Bill Bankhead visited the Florida Institute for Girls on Friday after learning two girls suffered broken arms within 10 days of each other while being physically restrained by staff.

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free press in the news

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/23/168232

Attorneys for the Republican Party are warning TV stations not to air a new commercial by the Democratic National Committee that charges President Bush misled the country in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. The video shows Bush saying, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Republicans said the ad is "deliberately false and misleading” because the ad omits the portion of Bush's statement where he points out that the disputed information came from the British government.

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amy goodman gets the scoop

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/23/168232

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined... by Terry McAuliffe, chair of the Democratic National Committee... It’s good to have you with us. What is your response? The Republicans say that they will sue any TV station that runs this ad. They sent a letter to a TV station in Wisconsin.

TERRY MCAULIFFE: Right. Well, the stations don't think much of it, Amy. They all decided to run the ad except for, as shocking as this may be, FOX news -- they're the only station deciding not to run it. So I guess they do decide what they want to put on their TV. The issue is George Bush's words -- it's not like we used an actor and put words -- these are George Bush's actual words in the State of the Union. They like to say, well, you didn't mention the British intelligence. Here's the whole issue -- the British intelligence had supplied intelligence to our intelligence. Our intelligence, the United States of America, said these words were incorrect. The State Department knew it, the C.I.A. knew it. Our President should rely on our intelligence and when he knows our intelligence is saying that it's not true, another foreign intelligence is saying it is true, you always rely on your own intelligence. We know what they wanted to do, Amy, they wanted to puff this up. They wanted to make the strongest case. They wanted to scare Americans to make them believe Saddam Hussein was processing nuclear rods to scare the American public. We know exactly what they were trying to do. It was misleading, not the truth, they deliberately did it. They should be held accountable. All we're asking for is an independent, bipartisan commission.

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great moments in congressional tears

http://www.statesman.com/asection/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/news_f3f1487f5569d00a10d2.html

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., one of the most powerful committee chairmen in Congress, broke down in tears on the House floor on Wednesday as he confessed to a hushed assemblage that he summoned the Capitol Police on Friday not only to restore order, but also to break up a meeting of Democrats... "As my mother would have put it, when they were passing out moderation, you were hiding behind the door," Thomas said, his voice breaking as he read from a prepared text.

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smartness in the news

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993975

US citizens will be issued with "smart" passports carrying a digitally signed photograph by late 2004. The new passports will include an embedded microchip that stores a compressed image of its owner's face... Passport checkpoints will not forward information to centralised databases unless there is query over the passport's authenticity... However, some technical experts also warn that such systems cannot guarantee complete security... In January 2001 Ross Anderson and Sergei Skorobogatov, also at Cambridge University, showed that data could be retrieved from a smart card's memory unit by focusing light from an ordinary camera flashgun on it.

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merle haggard!!!

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA7X8CJJID.html

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - A new Merle Haggard song that's critical of the media's coverage of the war in Iraq is garnering so much attention that it's being rushed to thousands of radio stations around the country, a spokesman for the country singer said Thursday. "We're mailing it out as we speak," Tom Thacker, vice president of Hag Records, said of the song "That's the News." ...Haggard sings, "Suddenly it's over, the war is finally done/Soldiers in the desert sand still clinging to a gun/No one is the winner and everyone must lose/Suddenly the war's over, that's the news."

...In an essay on Haggard's Web site, the singer writes, "I don't even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching."

[see also] Merle Haggard: http://www.merlehaggard.com/

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teach your parents well

Move over, college kids. Grandparents and roommates may be the first ones to pay for downloading songs on the Internet. The music industry's earliest subpoenas, issued as part of a high-stakes campaign to cripple online piracy by suing some of music's biggest fans, are aimed at a surprisingly eclectic group: a grandfather, an unsuspecting dad and an apartment roommate. "Within five minutes, if I can get hold of her, this will come to an end," said Gordon Pate of Dana Point, Calif., when told by The Associated Press that a federal subpoena had been issued over his daughter's music downloads.

The legal papers required an Internet provider, Comcast Cable Communications Inc., to hand over Pate's name and address. Pate, 67, confirmed that his 23-year-old daughter, Leah Pate, had installed file-sharing software using an account cited on the subpoena. But he said his daughter would stop immediately.

...Over the coming months this may be the Internet's equivalent of shock and awe, the stunning discovery by music fans across America that copyright lawyers can pierce the presumed anonymity of file-sharing, even for computer users hiding behind nicknames... A defendant's liability can depend on their age and whether anyone else knew about the music downloads... Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song.

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and feed them on your dreams

http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=12209

An estimated 84,000 students could be denied access to federal Pell Grants and hundreds of thousands of others could see their awards reduced because of changes to the federal financial aid formula... The change could reduce the Pell Grants program by $270 million and affect as much as $5 billion of the $90 billion national financial aid pool, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators... It is not solely Pell Grants that will suffer from the financial aid formula change. The formula determines not only how federal aid is distributed, but also how the state and the university distribute financial aid.

...The formula generates the expected family contribution from data submitted by students in the FAFSA—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Substituting more recent tax data into the formula, a change in the formula overestimates family income by using tax data from three years ago in 2000, when the economy was booming... The tax data may no longer reflect a family's disposable income or actual ability to pay for college.

The routine data change needed neither congressional approval nor public review. Tax tables, however, had not been updated in 10 years, since the 1994-95 award year.

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thoughtcrime

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2003107230109

As near as anyone can tell, Brian Dalton, 24, was the first person in U.S. history to be convicted for child pornography involving non-published writing rather than images. In other words, a thought crime.

...Dalton, who was on probation for a 1998 conviction involving child-porn pictures, wrote about torturing and molesting children in a personal journal. He made up the stories and never acted on them, but his probation officer found the journal during a search of his home and Dalton was charged with and pleaded guilty to pandering obscenity involving a minor. The result was a seven-year prison term, plus 41/2 years for violating probation - by writing in a private journal.

...His attorney, the court noted, mistakenly referred to the charge against Dalton repeatedly as if it involved an actual victim rather than a figment of his imagination.

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just stay home, dummy

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/7085696p-8033574c.html

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The government has no idea how many air travelers are being subjected to delays and missed flights... according to interviews and internal Transportation Security Administration documents... TSA spokesman Brian Turmail [said] in a phone interview [that] because there is no centralized computer system for TSA to monitor the number of people wrongly flagged by airlines, "We don't have any data on how many times this is happening," he said.

The internal documents were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is trying to persuade a federal judge to order the government to disclose who is on the watchlists, how people get on them and how somebody can get off them. Citing national security, the TSA has refused to answer these questions.

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mmm, security, just like mother used to make.

http://www.statesman.com/aponline/content/news/ap/ap_story.html/Washington/AP.V4547.AP-Missing-Uniform.html

Hundreds of uniforms, IDs and badges have been stolen or lost, raising concerns they could be used by terrorists, the Homeland Security Department said Thursday... But spokesman David Wray cautioned that the bulletin is simply meant to raise awareness about a potential problem... The information bulletin said a number of private companies have reported receiving suspicious inquiries about renting official delivery vehicles. It also said emergency services officials have "received unusual requests for detailed vehicle descriptions."

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one solution to the tanking economy

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/07/25/9462462

BARNEGAT, N.J. - Kathleen Wortman Jones was just another financially strapped New Jersey homeowner until the day she drove up to the Sun National Bank with her 14-year-old twin daughters. Desperate to save her house from foreclosure, the 34-year-old mother of four served as the getaway driver after the girls robbed the bank of $3,050... In addition to Jones and the twins, a 16-year-old daughter was arrested for conspiracy and husband Kevin Jones was charged as an accessory.

...In 2000, they moved into a modest four-bedroom ranch house. Last year, they went for months at a time without making the $1,000 mortgage payments. In July, Kathleen Jones filed for bankruptcy. Things worsened in September, when Kevin Jones was hospitalized with congestive heart failure and could not work. After the mortgage company that held the $94,223 note filed a foreclosure notice, Kathleen Jones' children took matters into their own hands, according to Kevin Jones. "They figured `If Daddy goes to work, he's going to die. Let's go get the money,'" he said. "It was the children that thought this up, not her. She woke up and caught them stealing my car to do a robbery. She drove that car to make sure her kids were safe, that whatever happened to them would happen to her."

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