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July 28: According to the testimony of an Iraqi prisoner tortured by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, US general Janis Karpinski witnessed his torture. Saddam Saleh Aboud, who is part of a lawsuit against the American corporations Titan and CAIC, who provided interrogators for the military, says that during one of his beatings, his hood was removed and he saw Karpinski standing close by, watching the soldiers beat him. Aboud identified Karpinski in a news magazine photograph that his lawyer, Michael Hourigan, showed him. "He was adamant that there was an occasion when he was being tortured, in Tier 1A, when she was present and watching and laughing as he was being tortured," Hourigan says. Aboud did not know who Karpinski was until Hourigan identified her to him. "He knew she was a supervisor, because she had a star on her hat and she was in an American uniform," Hourigan says. "He said the other soldiers would defer to her." Karpinski refuses to comment. Karpinski, who was suspended by the Pentagon in May 2004, has denied knowing about any abuses at the prison until photographs surfaced at the end of April. Investigators have not implicated Karpinski directly in any of the abuses. (AP/Washington Post/Truthout)
July 28: Miami-Dade County election officials confirm that all of the electronic voting records from the 2002 elections have been lost, fueling concerns that the county's voting machines are unreliable. The records were lost when two computers crashed last year, according to officials, but the loss wasn't made public until a citizens' group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, requested the voting records last month. The loss makes it impossible for anyone to audit the 2002 records, including the disputed Democratic gubernatorial primary between Bill McBride and Janet Reno. McBride narrowly won the primary, and lost badly to incumbent Jeb Bush. Many observers, particularly Democrats, feel that the primary election results may have been altered, allowing McBride, who was considered a far weaker challenger to Bush than Reno, to win. The election machines are owned and operated by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a firm with deep connections to state and national Republican organizations. University of Miami law professor Martha Mahoney, a member of the reform coalition, says she requested the 2002 audit data because she had never heard an explanation of lost votes that the ACLU documented after the Reno-McBride election. "People can never be sure their vote was recorded the way it was cast, but these are the best records we've got," she says. "And now they're not there."
On July 31, the missing data will be found, on a CD in the files of the Miami elections office. "We don't intend to be the laughingstock of the world this year for this election," says county elections chair Barbara Carey-Schuler. "We will not tolerate a circus-like election and we will not tolerate the debacles we have had in the past." But others question the validity of the disc. "There are now more questions than before," says Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chair of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. "I certainly want the disc; I certainly wish someone would test the original disc they are now claiming they found and determine when that disc was made, where it came from, whether it's been tampered with and if anyone's opened it." (New York Times/Truthout, AP/St. Petersburg Times)
July 28: Senator John Edwards addresses a wildly cheering crowd at the Democratic convention in Boston. Edwards, the running mate of fellow senator John Kerry, tells the crowd that "hope is on the way." He extolls the virtues of small-town America, reminds the crowd of his own humble origins in North Carolina, and asks his listeners to forego partisanship and work together for a stronger America. "What John Kerry and I believe is that you should never look down on anybody, that we should lift people up," he says. "We don't believe in tearing people apart, we believe in bringing people together. ...You can reject the tired, old, hateful, negative, politics of the past, and instead you can embrace the politics of hope." He touches briefly on his own campaign theme of "two Americas," one for the rich and one for the rest of the citizenry, but says, "it doesn't have to be that way, we can build one America." In contrast, Republicans say that the Democrats have not made good on their promise of a positive convention that eschewed attacks on the Bush administration. "In fact, when you get beyond the spin, the attacks this week have been base and vile, and even if they are delivered with a smile, they are still attacks," says Republican senator Mitch McConnell.
Before Edwards's speech, former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, the African-American activist, gives a rousing speech, providing the audience with some of the "red meat" that many of them have not heard from the other speakers. He addresses Bush directly: "Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African-American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question. You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us. ...Mr. President, you said would we have more leverage if both parties got our votes, but we didn't come this far playing political games. It was those that earned our vote that got our vote. We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats. Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn't gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of good men...soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away. This vote can't be given away. Mr. President, in all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale. ...Mr. President, we love America, not because all of us have seen the beauty all the time. But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody. Starting in November, let's make America beautiful again." (AP/China Daily, Washington Post [text of Sharpton's speech])
July 28: As part of the Democrats' attempt to demonstrate their support of, and by, the military, former Chief of Staff General John Shalikashvili speaks at the convention. The retired general appears as one of a dozen retired and current generals and admirals in the military supporting the Kerry presidency. Shalikashvili tells the audience, "I am here as an old soldier and a new Democrat. ...While I know the dark side of war I also know first-hand about the bright side of America. The America that from its earliest days has been a land of boundless opportunity and a beacon of hope and of liberty around the world. This is the America we cherish and defend and that is the America that John Kerry will lead. From my first days as a private in basic training, I have always been proud to be an American soldier. In my eyes there is no higher title. And for 39 years I had the great privilege to serve in the company of such heroes -- ordinary men and women whose selfless service and courage and love of country befit this extraordinary nation of ours. In places like Kabul and Kandahar and Fallujah and Tikrit and a thousand others we can hardly pronounce they are writing their own page in the glorious history of American fighting men and women. They fought and bled and too many of them have died. And all they have ever asked in return was that we lead them well, train them for the tasks at hand, equip them properly and give them enough men and material so no matter what they will always have enough of both to get the job done and to protect themselves and their buddies. And the only other thing they ask is that when we send them into harm's way we take care of their families here back home. That is all." (WPBF-TV [text of Shalikasvili's speech])
July 28: Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin says that the reason why many Americans feel they don't understand John Kerry's positions on foreign policy is because the media "dumbs down" Kerry's statements, then complains that they are hard to understand. Gitlin gives one of many examples: on May 27, Kerry delivered a strong, pointed 3,500-speech on foreign policy, saying, among other things, the Bush administration has "looked to force before exhausting diplomacy; they bullied when they should have persuaded. They've gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the worst. They've made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world. In short, they have undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and that is what I will restore. Shredding alliances is not the way to win the war on terror, or even to make America safer. As president, my No. 1 security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder, and our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells. Because al-Qaeda is a network with many branches, we have to take the fight to the enemy on every continent -- smartly. And we have to enlist other countries in that cause." Gitlin notes that the three networks provided their viewers with tiny snippets of Kerry's speech -- ABC, 28 words, NBC, 42 words, and CBS, 43 words -- and then put on pundits to complain that they didn't know where Kerry stands.
But this is only one salvo in what journalist Rob Garver calls "the Gore-ing of Kerry" by the media. He gives as an example a "profile" of Kerry written by Newsweek's Evan Thomas that is almost a word-for-word retread of the same profile Thomas wrote four years ago about Gore. In 2000, Thomas wrote an article called "The Precarious Prince" that portrayed Gore as virtually friendless in high school, "stiff," viewed as a phony by his classmates, and is now regarded as "remote" by voters. Thomas recycles the same selective accusations for Kerry in July 2004.
Thomas says Kerry was almost friendless in high school, is "stiff," viewed as a phony, and is seen by voters as "remote." "Gore was decent and upright but had few close friends at St. Albans," Thomas wrote in 2000. This week he wrote, "John Kerry has never fit in easily. When Newsweek asked about 30 of his 90-odd classmates at St. Paul's School to name his friends, they were stumped." Of Gore, Thomas wrote, "He was regarded by some as an Eddie Haskell figure, a little too unctuous with the grown-ups. ...In an era when most prep-schoolers wanted to sound like Holden Caulfield, sarcastic and subversive (a style perfected at Andover by George W. Bush), Gore's roommate, Geoff Kuhn, described Gore with a line from a children's story: 'controlled and cleanly, night and day.'" The same techniques are used to describe Kerry now: "'He wanted to be liked,' says his classmate John Rousmaniere. 'But he was too eager to please. John was a little clumsy in the way he approached people, a little too aggressive in trying to make friends. That's why people thought he was calculating.'" They made fun of Gore in high school, Thomas wrote: "His yearbook entry shows a cartoon of Gore as a statue on a pedestal, with a football, basketball and discus tucked under his arm. Gore is being made fun of, and not very subtly. The caption beneath his portrait quotes Anatole France: 'People with no weaknesses are terrible.'" Kerry? "Kerry took a strong interest in politics and world events, and was inevitably mocked for being too serious. He never ran for student office, in part because he didn't have the votes...." Gore was quite stiff as a high school student, an affliction that he battled in 2000, noted Thomas: "Gore knows that he has been a stiff ever since he was a little boy, and he admits he has labored mightily to loosen up." Kerry? "In the tribal world of Massachusetts pols, Kerry was routinely called a 'preppy stiff'..." Of Gore, Thomas wrote, "Watching Gore try to methodically dismember George W. Bush this fall with carefully preprogrammed assaults, voters may feel they're looking at a robot, or a tank." Kerry? "still, there is a posed, wooden quality about the public Kerry -- and sometimes, the private one, too. At times he looks like a stage set; an elegant facade concealing workmen who are still furiously toiling at some unseen project. Some of his closest friends say they don't know what he's really thinking. His distance and opaqueness can make voters uneasy."
Gore had no hope of being seen as a normal guy, Thomas wrote: "No matter how many earth-tone, open-neck shirts he wears, no matter how often he tells of toiling in the fields as a youth, no matter how much hominy he drips into his voice, no matter how glowing the reviews of his bold choice of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, he still comes across to many voters as remote and condescending -- like a man in a navy blue suit, the senator's son, the Harvard preppie, the vice presidential heir apparent, waiting for his preordained turn at the top." Kerry? "In a recent interview with Newsweek, Kerry protested that he's not really distant or remote. 'There's nobody who travels with me on the bus or in this campaign who thinks that,' he said. But then, in an earnest and slightly imploring manner, he went on to explain why he may have given off the impression of 'brashness.'" Why did Gore run in 2000 and Kerry in 2004? The same reasons. Gore was constantly trying to define himself in terms of his distant, demanding father, Thomas wrote. In his concluding paragraph on Gore, he noted, "Albert Gore Sr. seems to live on in his son's imagination as a caution and a goad, a constant reminder of the drive to succeed and the cost of failure, of the dangers, global and personal, that always lurk around the corner. It is a heavy burden to carry." Kerry? In the final paragraph of his Kerry profile, Thomas explains why Kerry stayed on his campaign plane one night to watch the last 15 minutes of Field of Dreams: "The movie is a story of a man whose dreams come true in Iowa, who was distanced from his father and who embarks on a fantastical road trip to find himself. It may be that the restless Kerry is still moving, still searching." Garvin writes, "Thomas, however, isn't doing much moving or searching these days. He found his story four years ago, and he's sticking to it." (American Prospect, American Prospect)
July 28: In the third of his four columns for USA Today covering the Democratic convention, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg complains that he finds the relentlessly upbeat, positive messages of the Democrats boring and sleep-inducing. "Journalists who came here hoping for red meat are moping at the steady diet of boneless, skinless, boiled chicken," he complains. Goldberg tries to stir the pot by taking a few obligatory swipes at the "Jurassic Park Democrat," Ted Kennedy, and at the "self-indulgent multilingual meanderings" of Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom he attacks for being rich and outspoken. His complements to Senatorial candidate Barack Obama are skewed by his observation that his speech would have been more appropriate at a Republican convention (where the spectacle of a black American of Kenyan descent running for a Senate seat can only be imagined), and then snipes that, had Obama actually made this speech as a Republican, he would have been labeled an "Uncle Tom." Goldberg's biggest complaint is that the convention lacks "red meat" in the form of personal attacks against Bush and his officials; it doesn't take a lot of imagination to envision Goldberg's angry and offended response had the Democrats given him what he asks for -- particularly in light of his column from the day before, where he attacked Democrats for being unified in what he calls their hatred of Bush and their nomination of Kerry as impelled by what he calls, inexplicably, "the logic of hate." Goldberg comes across as a verbal bully spoiling for a fight, and sulking when one isn't offered to him. (USA Today, USA Today)

Oil prices reach 21-year high

July 29: World oil prices shatter 21-year highs as Russian oil giant Yukos is enjoined by the judiciary to stop sales. Many predict Yukos will eventually collapse, and draw similarities between Yukos and former US oil conglomerate Enron. International oil capacity is almost at its top, with OPEC countries producing more oil than they have in 25 years to meet demands. Yukos, which owes the US $3.4 billion dollars in taxes among other debts, is facing bankruptcy. Until it ceased production, the company was pumping 1.7 million barrels of oil a day. OPEC president Purnomo Yusgiantoro of Indonesia says that the cartel was doing its best to get prices down: "We are very sincere about pushing the price to be stable below US$30 per barrel." (Business Times)
July 29: John Kerry formally accepts the Democratic nomination for the presidency at the Democratic Convention in Boston. He begins by telling the audience, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty," in a line deliberately kept from even the advance team. He recalls living for a time in West Berlin as a child, when his father, a State Department official, was stationed there: "I saw how different life was on different sides of the same city. I saw the fear in the eyes of people who were not free. I saw the gratitude of people toward the United States for all that we had done. I felt goosebumps as I got off a military train and heard the Army band strike up 'Stars and Stripes Forever.' I learned what it meant to be America at our best. I learned the pride of our freedom. And I am determined now to restore that pride to all who look to America." He tells the cheering crowd of Democratic delegates, "I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a secretary of defense who will listen to the best advice of the military leaders. And I will appoint an attorney general who will uphold the Constitution of the United States." Merle Black, a political specialist from Emory University, says of Kerry's speech, "He is speaking to the undecided voters, the anti-Bush is so strong, he can take almost any position and he still has Democrats. He looked good. He looked really energetic, relaxed and confident. ...At some point he needs to say 'If you are going to replace the guy, what are you going to be that is different?' But I think most people who saw him for the first time would have a favorable impression and it was wise for him to not directly engage the president."
Joining Kerry on stage is an array of his former military compatriots who served with him in Vietnam, whom he effusively greets one by one before taking the podium. Although the production was designed in part by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, the effect, at least in the opinion of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, is somewhat cheesy, "more suitable for a high school assembly than prime time."
Among the speakers preceding Kerry is former Democratic senator Max Cleland, the partially disabled Vietnam veteran who lost a bitterly contested 2002 re-election bid in an election many feel was fraudulently recorded. Clelend discusses Kerry's service in Vietnam, his and other Democrats' efforts to provide for disabled veterans: "[E]ven before I met John Kerry he was my brother. Even before I knew John Kerry he was my friend. Even before I spoke with John Kerry he gave me hope." In an effort to repudiate the ugly "swift Boat Veterans" organization, who has baselessly accused Kerry of fraudulently puffing his Vietnam record and of not earning the medals he was awarded, Cleland appears after a procession of Kerry's Vietnam colleagues appear, one after the other telling the audience moving stories about their experiences with Kerry in combat. (Washington Post, CBS, New York Times [text of Cleland's speech], Frank Rich p.137-8)
July 29: While Florida governor Jeb Bush reassures voters that the state's electronic voting machines are safe, a flier circulated by the Florida GOP tells Republican voters that the machines are anything but reliable, and urges them to vote by absentee ballot in November. "The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks and the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount," says the mailer, paid for by the Republican Party of Florida and prominently featuring two pictures of President Bush. "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today." The GOP tactic is the reverse of what Bush and state elections experts have said as they have repeatedly opposed Democratic moves, in the Legislature and courts, to require a paper trail on the machines. Florida Democrats are outraged. "I've seen that advertisement. It's appalling," says senator Bill Nelson. "It is an acknowledgement that there are excessive error rates with touch screens even by the party in power." State senator Ron Klein says, "That is awful. That is disgusting. Despicable. Why use dirty tricks to scare people?" Klein's fellow state senator, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, adds, "It's unbelievable. They're the ones who won't certify a machine to attach a paper trail." Governor Bush says he does not support the message; Florida Republican chairman Joseph Agostini initially denied his party was behind the mailer, but admitted it after being shown a copy of the flier. "It's an astonishing level of hypocrisy," says Sharon Lettman-Pacheco of People for the American Way Foundation, which sued the state seeking to force manual recounts for touch screen machines. "Which one is it: Do the machines work, or do they know something that we don't?" The flier also does not mention that it may be illegal for people to vote absentee without legal reasons for doing so, such as anticipated hospitalizations or being out of state on Election Day. (St. Petersburg Times)
July 29: Author Ronnie Dugger writes a long and detailed article about how the 2004 election could easily be stolen using electronic voting machine results. Up to 80% of the nation's likely voters will cast their votes on machines with no paper trails and operated by firms with close ties to the Bush administration and to the Republican party. "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses," John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March. "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." At the NAACP convention, Kerry reminded his listeners that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election." Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes." About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska, a company formerly owned in part by Republican senator Chuck Hagel. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire. About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at an ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since the ballot is purely electronic, there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks. Contracts between the states and the manufacturers keep the software used to tabulate the votes completely secret; any audits performed are done by representatives of the corporations, not by non-partisan officials. In other words, America's elections have been privatized. Last fall, David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.' ...Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."
Not only are the DRE's easily hacked and rigged, but so are the voting logs they print out. Robert Boram, the chief engineer who invented a DRE sold by the RF Shoup voting-systems company, says if he were asked to rig his system's ballot images, he could do it with a month's notice. Dugger writes, "The private election companies and local and state election officials, when required to carry out recounts of elections conducted inside the DREs, will order the computers to spit out second printouts of the vote totals and the computers' wholly electronic, fakeable 'audit trail.' The companies and most of the election officials will then tell the voters that the second printouts are 'recounts' that prove the vote-counting was '100 percent accurate,' even though a second printout is not a recount." All machine testing is done in secret by the private, industry-funded National Association of State Election Directors, using obsolete, pro-industry standard standards from the Federal Election Commission. "The system is much more out of control than anyone here may be willing to admit," Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University and for many years an examiner of voting machines for Texas and Pennsylvania, told a House panel on June 24. "There's virtually no control over how software enters a voting machine." Shamos told another House panel on July 20, "There are no adequate standards for voting machines, nor any effective testing protocols."
Seven Democrats, along with independent Jim Jeffords, are supporting a bill co-sponsored by senators Hillary Clinton and Bob Graham to mandate paper verifications of votes by November. The bill is opposed by Republicans. A similar House bill sponsored by 149 representatives, mostly (but not all) Democrats, has languished for over a year, with committee chairman, Republican Bob Ney, refusing to allow hearings on it until recently. Organizations such as Common Cause and, more recently, the League of Women Voters are supporting paper verifications. Some of the strongest opposition to paper verification comes from Florida, where state Republicans led by governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood have thrown their support behind electronic voting. Hood has said, laughably, that the voting machines cannot be tampered with "because they're not computers." A Republican state senator recently tried, and failed, to get a bill passed making recounts illegal; when that failed, Hood's director of elections, Ed Kast, simply issued a ruling in defiance of state law saying that elections supervisors need not recount ballots. The ACLU and other groups have sued to invalidate that ruling; a spokesperson for the state Republican Party excoriates the suit as a left-wing "ploy to undermine voters' confidence."
Meanwhile, attempts to limit the vote are progressing on other fronts. The governor is trying again to purge ex-felons from the voting rolls, a manuever that resulted in perhaps 100,000 legal voters being disenfranchised in November 2000. This year the state issued a list of 47,000 "identified felons" who should be purged from the voting rolls; the list was heavy with black citizens, and left off Hispanics, who in Florida tend to vote Republican. Bush abandoned the list, but said the disproportionate inclusion of blacks and the exclusion of Hispanics was "an error." Miami Herald columnist Jim Defede wrote that Hood -- an "amazing incompetent or the leader of a frightening conspiracy" -- must resign. She, of course, did not. Democrats know that an organized attempt to illegally influence the votes is underway. "Apparently their motives are to suppress the vote in Florida in a number of different ways," says representative Robert Wexler. "They are refusing a paper trail on a computerized voting machine. They are again preparing on the felons -- they've got a new and improved process. I don't trust them to do the right thing." And representative Alcee Hastings recently said, "Any way we cut it, these people are going to try to steal this election." Both the governor's office and the federal Department of Justice have refused requests from citizens' groups and lawmakers to audit the voting machines.
A few other states have taken measures against vote tampering. For a time, California secretary of state Kevin Shelley banned Diebold machines from his state after two highly publicized machine malfunctions. Two other secretaries of state, Republicans Dean Heller in Nevada and Matt Blunt in Missouri, have required that DREs in their states have a voter-verified paper ballot for the November election. Sequoia is providing machines with paper verifications for Nevada. Other smaller election machine manufacturers, including Avante and AccuPoll, have machines with voter verifications ready to market. Other states aren't so fortunate. In Texas, Democrat Ciro Rodriguez was narrowly defeated for re-election after being declared the winner when 419 "found votes" put his primary opponent, conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar, ahead; because of paperless DREs, a recount was impossible. And two years ago, after Alabama's attorney general Bill Pryor threatened anyone engaging in a recount with arrest, Bush elevated Pryor to a juicy judicial appointment. But even paper trails can't stop technicians or hackers from altering votes; they simply provide records of the votes originally cast, and these records, too, are vulnerable to tampering.
"These companies are basically saying 'trust us,'" says Rebecca Mercuri, who invested the system that current DREs use. "Why should anybody trust them? That's not the way democracy is supposed to work." Douglas Kellner, a leader on the New York City Board of Elections, exclaimed at a meeting of computer specialists in Berkeley this past spring, "I think the word 'trust' ought to be banned from election administration!" Avi Rubin, computer science professor and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, recently testified before the federal Election Assistance Commission, "The vendors, and many election officials, such as those in Maryland and Georgia, continue to insist that the machines are perfectly secure. I cannot fathom the basis for their claims. I do not know of a single computer security expert who would testify that these machines are secure." Mercuri wrote in her dissertation on vote-counting in 2001 that "security flaws [such as Trojan horse attacks] are possible in all of the computer-based voting systems" and that providing thorough examinations of source code and other circuits for DREs that vary from municipality to municipality "is a Herculean task -- one that is likely not to be affordable, even if it were accomplishable."
In Georgia, after that state adopted Diebold machines in 2002, several machines, sent to the state for training purposes, were stolen from a hotel conference room and never recovered. Later, nine to fourteen of the secret vote-counting codes inside other machines were also stolen. Diebold itself made numerous illegal changes to its tabulating software between June and November. The memory cards on which the votes on each of the computers were recorded on Election Day all over Georgia that year had no encryption. According to Rob Behler, who served as Diebold's production deployment manager in Georgia during the first half of that summer, those stolen cards could easily be used to change the results manually, precinct by precinct. Two prominent races had inexplicable outcomes that year: the Senate race between incumbent Max Cleland and Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss, and the governor's race between incumbent Roy Barnes and Republican Sonny Perdue. Polls showed Cleland with a 5-point lead just before the election; Chambliss won in a remarkable 12-point swing. Barnes, leading his race in the polls, lost in an even more remarkable 14-point swing. Suspicious voting anomalies turned up in numerous Diebold machines after the elections. Behler says his staff found problems with every single machine they examined just before the elections, and rejected a fifth of the machines as unusable. They downloaded software patches for the other machines over open, easily hacked FTP transfers, and Behler himself made numerous software changes over his unsecured laptop. The night of the November 2002 election, 67 of the memory cards used in Fulton County (Atlanta) disappeared. Running his laptop with a dual battery, Behler says, in six or seven hours he could have changed the totals on those 67 cards. "There's no technical problem," he says. "There was absolutely zero protection on the card itself. You throw the card in, you just drill down into its files." Each card for all 22,000 Diebold machines had the same password: 1111. Calls for recounts and investigations went unheeded.
In 2003, several kids interested in computers found themselves on Diebold's unsecured FTP site, the same site Behler used to download his software patches. The story found its way onto the Internet, and literary publicist Bev Harris, researching a book on vote-counting, found the site. Her publisher, David Allen, recognized the source codes and critical Diebold voting data. Both Harris and Allen were shocked to see such sensitive material openly available on the Web. A small group of activists in Georgia worked with Harris; one of them, Roxanne Jekot, who runs a software consulting firm, analyzed "almost every line" of the Diebold source code and found many ways to change vote totals there and also in the Microsoft operating code. "The software is totally junk," she says. "They sold vaporware." Determined to get peer review of what she was finding, Jekot approached David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor. "Both Roxanne and Bev were very courageous and determined to lift the veil of secrecy on the code," Dill says. "I think most academics would be much more cautious, especially about publishing the fact that they looked at the code. I certainly was, and I wasn't about to get other people in trouble by asking them to help me. A number of us would be inclined to talk to lawyers before doing anything too bold. So it made a huge difference that Bev posted the code in New Zealand for everyone to download. That reduced but didn't eliminate the legal risks of the Johns Hopkins/Rice University people looking at the code. If Bev and whoever else was involved in releasing this code had not been so brave, people [with strong professional reputations] might not have been able to speak out so freely." After some agreements on a division of roles, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and three other scientists produced a devastating twenty-three-page exposure of the Diebold software. That was followed by two more damaging technical studies in Ohio. Then a "Red Team" exercise to break the Diebold code was staged at RABA Technologies' headquarters in Maryland. Four of the eight computer scientists on the team had worked at the National Security Agency, and the team director had been the senior technical director for the NSA. The team concluded, "A voter can be deceived into thinking he is voting for one candidate when, in fact, the software is recording the vote for another candidate." A security vulnerability "allows a remote attacker to get complete control of the machine." And one can "automatically upload malicious software" that will "modify or delete elections."
New York election expert Douglas Kellner believes that the best practical remedy for the dangers of computerized vote-counting is voting on optical-scan systems, posting the election results in the precincts and keeping the ballots with the machines in which they were counted. In all computerized vote-counting situations the precinct results should be publicly distributed and posted in the precincts before they are transmitted to the center for final counting, Kellner says. Once they are sent from the precinct the audit trail is lost. Dugger writes, "People should go down to their local election departments and ask their supervisor of elections how they are going to know that their votes are counted -- and refuse to take 'Trust us,' or 'Trust the machines,' for an answer. They can be poll watchers. Many organizations are fostering poll watching, including People for the American Way's Election Protection 2004 project. Common Cause 'has made election monitoring a major project,' a spokesperson says. VerifiedVoting.org is concentrating on having people watch election technology, including pre-election testing as well as the procedures on election day. ...The computerized voting companies have precipitated a crisis for the integrity of democracy. Three months to go." (Nation)
July 29: A pessimistic report from Britain's Parliament warns that Afghanistan's barely nascent government could crumble under pressure from a resurgent Taliban and other internal strivings, and that efforts to curb the huge outflow of opium from that country are having little effect. The report, produced by the House of Commons's Foreign Affairs committee, also says that Iraq is in a steadily worsening situation, that Iraqi forces are unable to provide security, and that far more forces are needed to ensure order and stability in that country. The report also expresses concern that ministers and senior government officials were not properly informed of reports of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. It says that Britain's credibility in Iraq has been damaged by the failure to meet Iraqi expectations on the provision of basic services, such as water and electricity. It also says that Russia's support for Iran's nuclear activities could further destabilize the Middle East and contribute to the spread of WMDs there. Conservative committee member Sir John Stanley says that security in Afghanistan is "on a knife edge." NATO must answer Afghan president Hamid Karzai's call for more help, he says: "If we fail to do so then I believe there is a very serious risk that the country in security terms is going to go back very, very seriously. We could end up with a situation that everything we have tried to achieve could be set back almost to square one." (BBC)
July 29: In Baghdad, a group of Oregon National Guardsmen intervene to stop several Iraqi policemen in plain clothes from beating and abusing blindfolded and bound prisoners in the enclosed grounds of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The soldiers find 78 Iraqi detainees who say they had been beaten, starved and deprived of water for three days. One has an untreated gunshot wound in his knee. In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices -- metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their back and legs. The soldiers disarm the Iraqi jailers, move the prisoners into the shade, release their handcuffs and administer first aid. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Hendrickson, the highest ranking American at the scene, radios for instructions. But Hendrickson's superiors tell him to return the prisoners to their abusers and withdraw. One of the National Guardsmen, Captain Jarrell Southall, reports the abuse to a reporter from the Oregonian a week later. "I witnessed prisoners who were barely able to walk," Southall says. Other guardsmen confirm Southall's story. The US has confirmed the incident, and says it is being reviewed by American officials as well as officials from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. Senior Army officers have instructed soldiers not to discuss the incident. "Iraqis want us to respect their sovereignty, but the problem is we will be blamed for leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse," says Michael Rubin, a former adviser to the interim Iraqi government who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "We did not generally put good people in." The abused Iraqis had been detained for lack of proper identification; none have been charged with a crime. Most will be released soon after the incident.
On August 8, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to investigate the allegations. Wyden writes "that a full investigation immediately commence to determine whether proper procedure and law were followed by the American military commander(s) who allegedly gave the order to return tortured prisoners to their torturers." Wyden suggests that "the policy of the US is that we will no longer engage in torture, but we will turn a blind eye as it is committed by others." (Oregonian/CommonDreams, Albany Democrat-Herald)
July 29: The Defense Department has 106 "annexes" of documents purposely withheld from last spring's Taguba Report that show a myriad of horrific atrocities perpetrated on Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib by US soldiers, intelligence officials, and private contractors. The annexes include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and US soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside. The files make clear that responsibility for what Taguba called "sadistic, blatant and wanton" abuses extends to several high-ranking officers still serving in command positions. Major General Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of all military prisons in Iraq, was dispatched to Abu Ghraib by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last August. In a report marked secret, Miller recommended that military police at the prison be "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." After his plan was adopted, guards began depriving prisoners of sleep and food, subjecting them to painful "stress positions" and terrorizing them with dogs. A former Army intelligence officer says the intent of Miller's report was clear to everyone involved: "It means treat the detainees like sh*t until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep." In the files, prisoner after prisoner at Abu Ghraib describes acts of torture that Taguba found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses." The abuses took place at the Hard Site, a two-story cinder-block unit at the sprawling prison that housed Iraqi criminals and insurgents, not members of al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.
The stories are appalling. In one sworn statement, Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee number 151108, said he witnessed a translator referred to only as Abu Hamid raping a teenage boy. "I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his d*ck in the little kid's *ss," Hilas testified. "The kid was hurting very bad." A female soldier took pictures of the rape, Hilas said. Hilas also testified that he saw Specialist Charles Graner and another soldier tie a detainee to a bed and shove a "phosphoric light in his *ss...he was yelling for God's help." The same female soldier also photographed this torture session. Another prisoner, Abd Alwhab Youss, was punished after guards accused him of plotting to attack an MP with a broken toothbrush. Guards took Youss into a closed room, poured cold water on him, pushed his head into urine and beat him with a broom. Then the guards "pressed my *ss with a broom and spit on it," Youss said. Mohanded Juma, detainee number 152307, testified that on his first day at Tier 1A, the west wing of the Hard Site where prisoners were brought for interrogation, he was stripped and left naked in his cell for six days. Graner, the guard in charge of the tier, entered Juma's cell at 2 am, cuffed his hands and feet, and took him to the shower room, where a female interrogator questioned him. After she left, Graner and another man threw pepper in Juma's face, beat him with a chair until it broke and choked him until he thought he was going to die. The assault lasted for half an hour. "They got tired from beating me," Juma told investigators. "They took a little break, and then they started kicking me very hard with their feet until I passed out." In another instance, Graner and a fellow guard reportedly beat a detainee until his nose split open. Torin Nelson, one of thirty-two private contractors who worked as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, told investigators that he spoke with an interpreter who witnessed an interrogator toss a handcuffed prisoner from a car. "The interrogator then yells at him for falling on the ground and starts dragging or pulling the detainee by the cuffs," Nelson testified. He believed the story, Nelson added, "based on the stuff that I have heard and seen."
One of the most graphic and ugly testimonies comes from Amjed Isail Waleed, detainee number 151365. On his first day at the Hard Site, he told investigators, guards "put me in a dark room and started hitting me in the head and stomach and legs." Then, one day in November, five soldiers took him into a room, put a bag over his head and started beating him. "I could see their feet, only, from under the bag.... Some of the things they did was make me sit down like a dog, and they would hold the string from the bag, and they made me bark like a dog, and they were laughing at me." A soldier slammed Waleed's head against the wall, causing the bag to fall off. "One of the police was telling me to crawl, in Arabic," he testified, "so I crawled on my stomach, and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet. It kept going on until their shift ended at four o'clock in the morning. The same thing would happen in the following days." Finally, after several beatings so severe that he lost consciousness, Waleed was forced to lay on the ground. "One of the police was pissing on me and laughing at me," the prisoner said. He was placed in a dark room and beaten with a broom. "And one of the police, he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my *ss, and I felt it going inside me about two centimeters, approximately. And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water inside the room. And the two American girls that were there when they were beating me, they were hitting me with a ball made of sponge on my d*ck. And when I was tied up in my room, one of the girls, with blond hair, she is white, she was playing with my d*ck. I saw inside this facility a lot of punishment just like what they did to me and more. And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances."
Testimony from some of the soldiers in the photographs support the prisoners' charges. Private Lynndie England testified that on November 8th she went to the Hard Site to visit Graner, her boyfriend. Just after midnight, seven Iraqi detainees accused of taking part in a fight at one of the many tent compounds used to house prisoners at Abu Ghraib were brought to Tier 1A. Nori Al-Yasseri, detainee number 7787, was brought with the other prisoners to the Hard Site with empty sandbags over their heads to prevent them from seeing where they were and their hands bound behind their backs with plastic handcuffs. The guards threw the men against the walls until they collapsed on the floor in what England called a "dog pile." Some of the MPs took turns running across the room and leaping on top of the men. "A couple of the detainees kind of made an 'ah' sound, as if this hurt them or caused them some type of pain," Specialist Jeremy Sivits testified in a sworn statement. While the Iraqis were on the floor, England and Sergeant Javal Davis stomped on their fingers and feet. Sivits was certain that the men felt pain this time because he heard them scream. So did Sergeant Shannon Snider, who was working in an office on the top tier. Drawn by the cries of pain, Snider leaned over the railing and in a fury yelled down to Davis to stop abusing the prisoners. Davis stepped away from the men, and Snider left. "I believe that Sgt. Snider thought it was an isolated incident," Sivits testified, "and that when he ordered Sgt. Davis to stop, it was over." But it was just getting started.
After Snider had gone, the MPs pulled the prisoners to their feet one by one and removed their handcuffs. Graner, who had learned a few key phrases in Arabic, ordered the detainees to strip. As one prisoner took off his clothes, Graner cradled the man's head in one arm and smashed his fist into the naked and hooded man's temple. "Damn, that hurt!" Graner complained, waving his hand in the air. The prisoner went limp, and someone removed his hood. "I walked over to see if the detainee was still alive," Sivits testified. "I could tell that the detainee was unconscious, because his eyes were closed and he was not moving, but I could see his chest rise and fall, so I knew he was still alive." According to England, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick made an X on another prisoner's chest with his finger and said, "Watch this." Then Frederick punched the man in the chest. The hooded prisoner lurched backward and fell to his knees, gasping for air. "Frederick said he thought he put the detainee in cardiac arrest," Sivits later told investigators. England was asked why she thought Frederick assaulted the man. "I guess just because he wanted to hit him," she said. Eventually, all seven Iraqis were standing naked and hooded, and the MPs got out their cameras. A few pictures had been taken earlier in the evening, but now the abuse turned into a photo-op. Men taught to be ashamed of appearing naked in front of other men were forced to assume a series of humiliating and bizarre poses. Graner had them climb on top of each other to form a human pyramid, and the MPs took turns taking each other's picture standing behind the men. In one photo, Graner and England smile and give the thumbs-up sign behind the men, who are naked except for the green sandbags covering their heads. The Iraqis were made to crawl across the floor on their hands and knees while the guards rode on their backs. Two were posed as if performing oral sex on each other, and others were lined up against the wall and forced to masturbate while England pointed at their genitals and leered. And all the while, the Americans were laughing, cracking jokes and taking pictures. An Army investigator later asked one of the seven Iraqis how he felt that night. "I was trying to kill myself," replied Hussein Al-Zayiadi, detainee number 19446, "but I didn't have any way of doing it."
The secret files show that day-to-day living conditions at Abu Ghraib were "deplorable" for soldiers as well as prisoners. The facility was under constant attack from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Six detainees and two soldiers were killed, and seventy-one were injured. But officers at Abu Ghraib told Taguba that their repeated requests for combat troops and armored vehicles to protect the facility were ignored by top brass. "I feel, and my soldiers feel, that we're just sitting out there, waiting to die," said Captain James Jones of the 229th MP Company. "As a commander, I'm charged with bringing my soldiers home, but how do I control that? It's frustrating. It's frightening." The prison was filled far beyond capacity. Some 7,000 prisoners were jammed into Abu Ghraib, a complex erected to hold no more than 4,000 detainees. Prisoners were held in canvas tents that became ovens in the summer heat and filled with rain in the cold winter. One report found that the compound "is covered with mud and many prisoner tents are close to being under water." Another report described the conditions in one compound: "The area is littered with trash, has pools of water standing around latrines, and the bottles of water carried by detainees for water consumption are filthy. The tents lack floors and are inadequate to provide protection from the elements." Detainees wore soiled clothes because laundry facilities were inadequate; mentally ill detainees were "receiving no treatment." In a series of increasingly desperate e-mails sent to his higher-ups, Major David DiNenna of the 320th MP Battalion reported that food delivered by private contractors was often inedible. "At least three to four times a week, the food cannot be served because it has bugs," DiNenna reported. "Today an entire compound of 500 prisoners could not be fed due to bugs and dirt in the food." Four days later, DiNenna sent another e-mail marked "URGENT URGENT URGENT!!!!!!!!" He reported that "for the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat." Officers reported that their repeated pleas for adequate food and supplies went unheeded, even though prisoners were attacking soldiers. "I don't know how they're not rioting every day," Jones told Taguba.
The worst riot occurred on November 24th. According to an internal investigation, prisoners in one compound "were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad' and other slogans to that effect." The detainees threw rocks at guard towers and at soldiers on the other side of the concertina wire. One guard said that "the sky was black with rocks;" another added that he "feared for his life." The riot quickly spread to other compounds, where several guards were injured by flying debris. The soldiers fired nonlethal ammunition at the mob but quickly exhausted their meager supplies. Fearing they were on the verge of a mass prison break, the guards were given the go-ahead to use deadly force, and they opened fire with live ammunition. Three detainees were killed and nine were wounded. Nine soldiers were also injured in the riot. That same evening, a detainee in Tier 1A told an MP that a prisoner had a gun and several knives. The informant even knew where he was: Cell 35. The guards instructed every prisoner on the tier to put their hands through the cell bars to be handcuffed, a standard precaution before searching a cell or moving a prisoner. But when the MPs came to Cell 35, the man inside refused to put his hands out. Instead, he told the guards he "had no gun." No one had used the word gun around the prisoner. Sergeant William Cathcart, one of the MPs on duty that night, immediately made a grab for the man's wrists. The prisoner pulled away and fell to his knees to say a prayer. "At that point," Cathcart told investigators, "I knew it would be a gun battle." He was right. The detainee suddenly turned, withdrew a 9 mm pistol from under his pillow and opened fire on Cathcart from close range. A bullet struck the MP in the chest. Fortunately, before beginning the search, Cathcart had put on his "full battle rattle" - a Kevlar vest with pockets holding ceramic plates - and wasn't injured. Another MP shot the inmate with two nonlethal rounds, knocking the man down. But the prisoner jumped back up and continued to fire. An MP finally ended the incident by firing a load of buckshot into the man's legs. An internal Army investigation shows that the prisoner obtained the gun because the CPA had hired at least five members of Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary organization of fanatical Saddam loyalists, to work as guards at the prison. An Iraqi guard, probably one of "Saddam's martyrs," had smuggled the gun and two knives into the prison in an inner tube, placed them in a sheet and tossed them up to the second-story window of Cell 35. In May, when Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Wayne Allard asked him a direct question: "Did we have terrorists in the population at this prison?" Taguba answered, "sir, none that we were made aware of." There may have been no terrorists among the prisoners, but there were certainly some among the guards.
Taguba was only authorized to investigate the role of military police in the torture at Abu Ghraib -- even though the Hard Site was controlled by military intelligence when the worst abuses occurred. Nevertheless, the classified annexes indicate that responsibility for the torture extends at least as high as several top-ranking officers in Iraq who have yet to be disciplined or removed from command. Major General Barbara Fast, who remains director of military intelligence in Iraq, was aware of the conditions at Abu Ghraib and received regular reports from officers at the prison. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, who directed intelligence at the prison, admitted to Taguba that he did not actually report to the British colonel who was supposedly his supervisor. "On paper, I work directly for him," Jordan told Taguba. "But between you, me and the fence post, I work directly for General Fast." Fast is currently under investigation, but unlike lower-ranking officers and soldiers, she has not been reprimanded or charged in the abuses.
Miller, who was sent by Rumsfeld to speed up interrogations at Abu Ghraib, spent ten days in Iraq touring prisons and meeting with intelligence officials. Miller formerly ran the military prison at Guantenamo Bay, Cuba, where "enemy combatants" were already being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners. According to Colonel Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib, Miller spoke with him about using dogs on prisoners: "He said that they used military working dogs, and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information." Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of all military prisons in Iraq, says that Miller described his plan to "Gitmo-ize interrogation operations" in Iraq and boasted that prisoners at Guantenamo "were treated like dogs, because you can never let them be in charge." Miller has denied making either statement. However, his plan to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence" was quickly adopted at Abu Ghraib. A slide presentation in the classified files spells out the new "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," specifying that soldiers, with proper approval, may subject prisoners to dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the "presence of mil working dogs." In at least one instance documented by Taguba and photographed by soldiers, a prisoner at Abu Ghraib was bitten by a dog. Most of the MPs who have been charged with crimes say they were told by military intelligence officers to "soften up" prisoners prior to interrogations. "MI wanted to get them to talk," Specialist Sabrina Harman told investigators, saying she was told to keep detainees awake. Davis, who jumped on the pile of seven detainees on November 8th, said intelligence officers would tell guards to "loosen this guy up for us" and "make sure he has a bad night." The classified files also show that intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib felt pressured to produce results. "sir," Jordan told Taguba, "I was told a couple of times...that some of the reporting was getting read by Rumsfeld, folks out at Langley [the CIA], some very senior folks." In May, after photos of the torture were published, Rumsfeld declared that he would take "all measures necessary" to ensure that such abuse "does not happen again." But he had already sent a clear signal to commanders in Iraq about his position on the proper way to interrogate prisoners. In April, Rumsfeld transferred Miller from Guantanamo to Baghdad, putting him in charge of all military prisons in Iraq. Instead of court-martialing the man who authored the plan to subject prisoners at Abu Ghraib to harsh abuses, Rumsfeld has left him in charge of the facility. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have changed this," Miller told reporters in May. "Trust us. We are doing this right." (Rolling Stone/Informationa Clearinghouse)
July 29: Army Specialist Ralph Logan, testifying against four soldiers facing courts-martial for forcing two Iraqi civilians to jump off an embankment into the Tigris River, causing the death of one, tells the court that the other three were ordered to do so by their superior, Sergeant Reggie Martinez. Martinez and the others face a variety of charges, including manslaughter, assault, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Witnesses, including Logan, testify that after the incident that they were urged to mislead investigators. "The senior NCOs [noncommissioned officers] didn't tell us to lie, but they told us to say we detained the Iraqis, brought them to the bridge and let them go," Logan says. The two Iraqis were detained for violating curfew. (Los Angeles Times/Truthout)
July 29: Canadian citizen Maher Arar says he knows from first-hand experience that the US does, indeed, condone and support torture of terror suspects. It happened to him. Arar, a native Syrian, was picked up by US security officials at JFK Airport, accused of being a terrorist, and "rendered" to a Syrian prison for over 10 months, where he was confined in a cell no larger than a coffin, beaten, and abused. "I think when they say they do not support torture, they are not being truthful," says Arar, a telecommunications engineer now living in Ottowa. "Whether they admit or not, they are complicit." Arar, who was never formally charged with a crime nor given a chance to challenge the "evidence" against him, is suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and other top goverment officials because of the rendition. He says they knew he would be tortured when they sent him to Syria. "My view is that it's entirely illegal," says one of his lawyers, Georgetown University Law School professor David Cole. "The Convention Against Torture forbids sending a person to a country where there is reasonable belief he will be tortured." Syria has long been criticized for rampant human rights violations by the US government, and the Bush administration has sanctioned the country for its ties to terrorist organizations. "You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to believe that the Syrians were not going to use torture, even if they were making claims to the contrary," says former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro, who calls Arar's treatment "morally indefensible." The Canadian government has opened an inquiry into Arar's case, and whether they were given complete information on the detention and rendition of one of their citizens by the US government.
Arar says that although he has no ties to terrorists of any kind, after two weeks of beatings and abuse by Syrian interrogators, he told them what they wanted to hear -- that he had trained in terror camps in Afghanistan. "I've never even been to Afghanistan," he says. He says he recalls almost nothing of what he told his interrogators during the torture sessions. Arar may have been picked up because of a "confession" beaten out of another prisoner, Ahmad Abou-ElMaati, an acquaintance of Arar's from Canada. ElMaati now says that he was tortured by his Syrian captors and falsely confessed to a terrorist bomb plot. Pressured to list his Syrian acquaintances in Canada, he named Arar. Human rights advocates became involved in his case, and his wife lobbied strenuously for his release. Canadian diplomats were only allowed brief, intermittent visits with Arar; he was warned by his captors not to breathe a word to them about how he was being treated or things would worsen considerably. He was finally released on October 5, 2003. He has never been charged with a crime; neither was ElMaati. Arar's supporters say the case shows how the flimsiest of evidence can turn a man's life upside down in the post-9/11 hysteria. "It's shameful, there's just no other way to say it, shameful," says Scott Horton, the past chairman of the international human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. (Knight-Ridder/CommonDreams)
July 29: The Marine Corps is investigating Lance Corporal Abdul Henderson, an Iraq veteran who agreed to appear in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. On camera, he said that he would not return to Iraq if ordered by the Marines. Even with the investigation, Henderson is sticking to his principles. "I'm conflicted because as a soldier, you're compelled to the call of duty -- that's what I signed up for," he says. "But I'm standing up for what I believe in." If he is called up and refuses to go, he will be classified as a deserter and could face court-martial. "When this country goes to war, everyone should pitch in," he says. "As a soldier, that's what I signed up for." But returning to Iraq makes no sense to Henderson any more than invading it does. "I'd go to Afghanistan" because it's harboring terrorists, he says. "But Iraq? Where's the imminent threat?" Henderson is a devout Christian who is working towards a business degree at Cal State-Fullerton; he has a wife, who is a doctoral student, and a newborn son. (USA Today)
July 29: A small cadre of extremist right-wing Cuban exiles and emigres in South Florida have essentially seized control of the Bush administration's policy towards Cuba, claims writer Mark Castro, using their leverage as a key voting bloc in Florida in return for steering the administration away from any possible reconciliation with the small island nation. "The thinking of this faction is unrepresentative of the American people and even of the Cuban-American community," writes Castro. "Yet the outlook of this minority within a minority informs our government's entire approach to Cuba." (Miami New Times)
July 29: The eminent and non-partisan Columbia Journalism Review takes CNN to task for its highly colored, highly partisan coverage of the Democratic convention. CJR observes, "Defenders of Fox News, CNN's arch rival, argue that Fox takes a conservative slant to offset CNN's [perceived] liberal stance. Critics of both think, by contrast, that CNN, badly bruised in the ratings war, has stooped to slavish imitation of Fox's most dubious ploys and policies. After tracking last night's coverage, we know where we stand." CJR notes a series of recurring themes in the coverage of July 28. It is summed up thusly:
- CNN is so desperate for conflict that it's willing to repeat every possible Republican-generated criticism, without making any attempt to sort through which are valid and which aren't. This often entails allowing Republicans to recycle charges which have been shown to be untrue or misleading, without correcting them: Anderson Cooper and Dana Bash spend a lot of time exploring Republican charges about John Edwards's lack of foreign policy experience, with only RNC chairman Marc Racicot brought on for illumination. Republican-based criticism of Kerry's foreign policy positions is discussed by Jeff Greenfield, Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff, and though the reporters cite the support by a dozen retired generals and admirals for Kerry, they spend far more time discussing Kerry's supposed "flip-flopper" record, using RNC talking points as support, and repeating the Republican spin that Kerry will pursue a foreign policy identical to that of Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis (!). Anderson Cooper allows Racicot to accuse keynote speaker Barack Obama of lying about troop disposition in Iraq without asking him for clarification; Blitzer allows Republican campaign operative Ralph Reed to regurgitate the accusations that "Kerry is the most liberal senator" in Congress without challenging him to prove the statement, as well as outright lie about Kerry's voting record.
- An equal obsession over Kerry's vote against the $87 billion to fund the Iraq war, along with a complete inability to report accurately on the issue: Greenfield, Blitzer, and Joe Klein recycle Republican talking points without contradiction, and echo each other in telling the audience how effective the Republicans have been in pillorying Kerry over the funding vote.
- The need for conflict is also forcing CNN to find instances of intra-party disagreement and make them out to be controversial -- hence an obsessive focus with the fact that Kerry's unwillingness to bring the troops home from Iraq immediately conflicts with the views of what CNN has decided is a majority of delegates: Cooper harps on the "fact" that Kerry is avoiding discussion of Iraq during the convention, ignoring the reality that Kerry touched on the theme time and time again of how differently he would handle the occupation and how he would ask the cooperation of the global community in helping to resolve the situation and eventually get US troops home. When Cooper mentions the speeches of Dennis Kucinich and Jesse Jackson, who directly advocated bringing troops home within a stated timeframe, he notes that delegates cheered the speeches but spins it to say that the delegates are in conflict with Kerry's own position. Blitzer and Candy Crowley jump on the theme, again without comment from anyone in Kerry's campaign or another Democrat.
- There's also a fixation on the Kerry campaign's stated desire to avoid attacking the president. To judge from reporters' tones, CNN seems to view it as a moral failing that an opposition party would criticize a sitting president. They were particularly distressed by a speech given by Al Sharpton: CNN attacks either way. According to commentary from, among others, Racicot, Cooper, Blitzer, Crowley, and David Gergen, the restraint is tantamount to mush-mouthed cowardice. But the relatively direct attacks of Al Sharpton come under fire, with Crowley accusing him of "crossing [the] line" and Blitzer speculating, without any verification, that the Kerry campaign disapproved of Sharpton's speech.
- There was also near-constant repetition from CNN of the assumption that voters see Democrats as weaker on national security: Woodruff and John King harp on Republican talking points about Democrats being untrustworthy with the nation's security, with King stating how difficult it will be to convince Americans to "change commanders-in-chief in the middle of a war."
- And of course, a slew of miscellaneous instances of nonsensical reporting: Crowley mocks Kerry for riding on a "slow boat" named the Lulu E., "a teensy bit outside the muscular image the Kerry campaign is hoping to conjure up to show voters he's tough too." Cooper tells the audience that "today's buzz" is the "question" of whether or not John Edwards will either "make the case for Kerry, or take on President Bush" (but not both -- ?) Cooper also asks why speakers don't spend a lot of time "talking backwards," or discussing the past. John Schneider really carries water for the Republicans: "John Kerry doesn't want to be Michael Dukakis. He wants to be Teddy Kennedy. Michael Dukakis has disappeared. He has the image of loser to the Democratic Party." Greenfield mocks Obama, who discussed having a single America, and Edwards's campaign theme of "two Americas:" "They might want to figure out how many Americas there are and get a united party." Kelly Wallace demands explanations from unspecified Democrats, without actually asking one, why Kerry has failed to reach out to African-Americans. She gives no factual basis for that charge. Crowley leaps on board to cite the fact that Bush has three black Cabinet members, and asks, based on that single fact, "what makes for the fact that there are African-Americans that do believe the Republicans are on the right track?" Aaron Brown says Ohio is "a classic state where the party has to be careful of being seen as too liberal, correct?" -- news to Democrats, who perceive Ohio as being quite centrist. And Brown finishes his commentary by inviting "Jonah Goldberg, who's the editor at large or an editor at large for National Review online, which is a terrific read and a contributing editor of National Review," to join him in the booth, without identifying Goldberg as a conservative. (Columbia Journalism Review)
July 29: Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, hired by USA Today to replace Ann Coulter in writing commentary for the Democratic National Convention, makes a cogent point in his last editorial about the convention. Goldberg writes, "From the outset, this convention has appealed to voters who are not merely undecided about Bush vs. Kerry, but who are undecided about a lot of things. I'd presume that some delegates...may feel as though they've just seen a Rorschach test in which people of diverse political views can all see something in the candidate." Goldberg is correct in his observation that the Democrats attempted to appeal to a broad base of voters and thereby diluted their candidate's appeal to specific groups, as well as came off as a bit mushy and unfocused. Unfortunately, Goldberg uses long-discredited examples of Kerry's supposed "flip-floppery," such as the so-called reversal on the $87 million defense budget, to bolster his claims. He writes, "This theme plays out over and over again in his biography, most famously in his record as both a decorated veteran and demagogic anti-war activist. He was for the Vietnam War before he was against it. In Kerry's world, squares can be circles, straight lines crooked, cats dogs. To borrow from the immortal Yogi Berra, when Kerry comes to a fork in the road, he takes it." Nicely written, but a quick analysis of Kerry's positions on the Vietnam War, on supporting the US military, and the war in Iraq prove that Goldberg is tossing aside the facts in favor of an elegantly phrased attack.
Goldberg writes his columns to provide an alternative viewpoint of the Democratic convention for USA Today, a laudable goal. Next month, leftist filmmaker Michael Moore will perform the same function for the newspaper at the Republican convention. While Goldberg's four columns have been roundly refuted by Democratic commentators and others on the left, Goldberg was treated with nothing but courtesy and respect by convention attendees. Not so with Moore, who will be personally vilified and cursed by delegates from the floor of the Republican convention, falsely accused of cursing a delegate himself, and will be removed from the convention two days early at the behest of GOP representative John Shadegg, who calls Moore "the Anti-Christ" and demands that USA Today retract Moore's credentials or face retaliation. (USA Today)

July 30: Numerous Democrats who attempt to attend a July 31 speech by Vice President Dick Cheney in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, are refused entry to the venue unless they agree to sign oaths pledging their support for the Bush-Cheney ticket. Bush campaign spokesman Dan Foley says the measure was enacted to prevent a disruption, which he alleges Democrats are planning. Democratic spokesmen hotly deny planning any disruptive activities. Several Democrats calling from a phone belonging to the activist organization ACT are asked to provide large amounts of personal information, including their driver's license numbers, and then presented with a pledge of endorsement when they go to pick up their tickets to the event. John Wade says he signed the pledge because he wanted the tickets but then changed his mind: "I got to thinking this is not right. They're excluding people -- that's what has me so upset." Wade returns the tickets and campaign workers return his pledge. Vietnam veteran Michael Ortiz y Pino says he refused to sign the pledge and was refused tickets. Ortiz y Pino was asked if he associated with veterans, pro-life, gun rights or teacher groups. Neither man wanted to give driver's license numbers but did so. "I said, why do you need that?" Ortiz y Pino recalls. He was told by a campaign worker, "secret Service stuff." In contrast, at a recent Kerry campaign event, anyone who requested tickets was given one, and a dozen Bush supporters mounted a loud but peaceful protest. Richard Fox, a political science instructor at a local community college, says attempts to screen political events is commonplace, but "This pledge or this 'loyalty oath' -- quote-unquote -- to me is unheard of." (Casper Star-Tribune)

The Bush campaign "loyalty oath"

July 31: The Bush administration says it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials. This astonishing decision came about after they concluded that such a system would cost too much, would require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty. They refuse to explain how they believed US security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty. Arms-control experts are critical of the decision, saying that the change in US position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they say, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs. The announcement at the UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament comes several months after President Bush declared it a top priority of his administration to prevent the production and trafficking in nuclear materials, and as the administration works to blunt criticism by Democrats and others that it has failed to work effectively with the United Nations and other international bodies on such vital global concerns. "The president has said his priority is to block the spread of nuclear materials to rogue states and terrorists, and a verifiable ban on the production of such materials is an essential part of any such strategy," says Daryl Kimball, director of Arms Control Association. "Which is why it is so surprising and baffling that the administration is not supporting a meaningful treaty." Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry supports the verification provision and has criticized the administration's policies on weapons of mass destruction, particularly after none turned up in Iraq after the war. In 2001, the administration opposed attempts to create an inspections regime for the Biological Weapons Convention. It has signed an arms-reduction deal with Russia that doesn't include new verification mechanisms, and in its first year in office, the administration pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The New York Times calls Bush's request for no verification a "gift to bomb makers," and writes, "[I]t is astonishing, and frightening, that the Bush administration is now pushing to strip the teeth from a proposed new treaty aimed at expanding the current international bans on the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. ...The most effective remaining way to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to growing numbers of countries and terrorist groups is to impose strict, verifiable international controls on the production of nuclear bomb ingredients. The Bush administration prefers a treaty that endorses nuclear virtue but that then averts its eyes." (Washington Post, New York Times)
July 31: Halliburton sues three retirees, all former employees, after they complained in a letter last January about the company's plan to discontinue health insurance benefits to the company's retirees who are eligible for Medicare. The retirees say that Halliburton is breaching its agreement, made in its 1998 merger with Dresser Industries, that requires the company to continue paying health benefits to 4,000 salaried retirees. Halliburton says it has the right to terminate those benefits regardless of what their agreement was. Halliburton files the lawsuit as a pre-emptive move to counter a possible lawsuit from the retirees. Former Dresser employees who joined Halliburton as a result of the merger have complained that Hallburton slashed their early retirement pensions. Former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney enjoys a $20 million pension; the retirees lost a combined total of $25 million from their pension plans, which many say will drive them into penury. (Houston Chronicle/Halliburton Watch)
July 31: Veteran political commentator Robert Parry writes that the US intelligence community and the US media have degenerated into little more than "broken toys" under the Bush regime: "The key institutions that are intended to supply the US government and the American people with accurate information -– the intelligence community and the news media -- have become 'broken toys' largely incapable of fulfilling their responsibilities, a predicament that has worsened during the Presidency of George W. Bush." Both the intelligence community and the mainstream media have become little more than propaganda outlets for the Bush administration, at a frightful cost not only to American democracy, but for the survival of American constitutional democracy. As a single example of many, Parry points to the confrontation between Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor, a Fox News talk show, on July 26. O'Reilly demanded that Moore apologize for "lying" about Bush's assertions of Iraqi WMDs, even though O'Reilly himself admitted that Bush was wrong about said weapons -- but since Bush had merely acted on bad information, he wasn't a liar, and Moore should apologize. Moore, of course, refused, and demanded an apology from Bush for using that information to sacrifice 900+ American soldiers in Iraq. While the confrontation was predictable, Parry notes that even 30 years ago, it would have been almost unheard-of for a major media figure as O'Reilly to be such a blatant administration apologist. Parry writes, "Normally, news organizations don't rally to the defense of politicians who have misled the American people as significantly as George W. Bush had on Iraq or as George H.W. Bush had on the Iran-Contra and other scandals of the 1980s. Offending pols are sometimes allowed to make their own case -– explaining how their false statements weren't exactly lies -– but rarely would a journalist make the case for them. At least those were the rules of the game 30 years ago at the time of Watergate. But the rules changed with the development of the conservative media-political infrastructure from the late 1970s to the present. The two George Bushes were two of its principal beneficiaries. While Democrats and liberals could expect to be skewered over minor or even imagined contradictions, Republicans and conservatives would find themselves surrounded by a phalanx of ideological bodyguards. Not only would O'Reilly and his fellow conservative media personalities defend George W. Bush over his false statements about Iraq, they could be counted on to go on the offensive against anyone who dared criticize him. That was true during the run-up to the Iraq War when they wouldn't permit a serious debate about the WMD and other issues -– and it was true after the invasion."
Parry cites as another example the mainstream press piling on with the conservative news outlets to shout down and attempt to discredit former Marine and UN inspector Scott Ritter. Even more damning, now that the WMD story has been shown to have been patently false, instead of following up on that story and the disastrous effect it has had on the US military, the US economy, and on Iraq, the mainstream media has joined with propaganda outlets such as Fox News to continue to hector and slander critics such as Moore and Ritter, "who supposedly have voiced their criticism of Bush a decibel too loud or took it a notch too far." Not only have mainstream media voices refused to discuss the Bush administration's lies and misleading statements, they have joined in with those lies, as when ABC's Ted Koppel, during the Democratic convention, repeated the patently false Bush allegation that Saddam Hussein had refused entry to UN inspectors before the war. Parry writes, "Yet, through repetition the Bush administration's favored narrative of the war has sunk in as a faux reality for Washington journalists, including Koppel, that Bush bent over backwards to avoid the invasion and was forced to attack because Hussein's intransigence made it look like the dictator was hiding something." When Bush officials denigrated and slandered former administration officials such as Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke for daring to speak out against administration lies, the media joined in -- instead of reporting on, and investigating, the claims of these two seasoned and reliable officials, they echoed the Bush story that both were merely disgruntled former employees with an axe to grind. Slanders against the patriotism and loyalty of Bush administration opponents and critics are also routine, and rarely challenged, but instead parroted. The attack on John Kerry as somehow having French loyalties has become a standard, not only of Bush attacks, but of media characterizations. In addition, charges that Kerry is a "serial liar" -- shades of Gore 2000 -- or even possibly delusional and mentally ill -- shades of McCain 2000 -- are rarely challenged.
So why don't Democrats fight back? Well, they do, says Parry, but when they do, they are roundly slammed by the media, so they often try to sound nuanced and less combative. "Indeed, that's another factor that favors Republicans because they can come across as more aggressive and more confident, while Democrats often end up sounding more timid and more uncertain," says Parry. "That cautious tone can turn off much of the Democratic base while leaving many independent voters questioning whether the Democrats really know what they stand for. In cases where Democrats do sound off -– as with Howard Dean's campaign -– they are labeled shrill, crazy or hate-filled. The Democratic-defensive dynamic, however, is another consequence of the media-political infrastructure that Republicans and conservatives have spent three decades -– and billions of dollars -– creating. Especially since Democrats and liberals have failed to match the investment and the dedication, the Right-Wing Machine has given Republicans a powerful advantage -– and one that does not seem likely to go away. As long as right-wingers, such as Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch, continue to pour vast sums into this media-political apparatus, the Republicans can expect to be protected when they make missteps. At the same time, Democrats can expect to pay a high price even for an innocuous mistake."
Parry concludes, "some journalists respond to criticism about their errors in covering important events of the past quarter century by suggesting that the historians will correct any mistakes. 'Leave it to the historians' is a common reply when inaccuracies are pointed out. But there are growing warning signs that history may become the next 'broken toy,' unable to fulfill its responsibilities either. ...Much of the change over the past three decades has come gradually, failing to cause alarm, as with a frog not recognizing the danger of sitting in water slowly being brought to a boil. Many of the events may seem on the surface disconnected, although many of the central characters have reappeared throughout the course of the drama and others were understudies of earlier characters, carrying on their mentors' tactics and strategies. But viewed as a panorama of 30 years, a continuity becomes apparent. What one sees is an evolution of a political system away from the more freewheeling democracy of the 1970s toward a more controlled system in which consensus is managed by rationing information and in which elections have become largely formalities for the sanctioning of power rather than a valued expression of the people's will." (Consortium News)

Back to July 2004

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

July 2004, Week Four

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Oil prices reach 21-year high

The Bush campaign "loyalty oath"

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