Beyond Bush II (From the Wilderness)
Now that its apparent that Bush and Cheney are gone, whether they like it or not, NOW WHAT? An excellent analysis of some of the possible Democratic front-runners, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Dennis Kucinich (and Daniel Sheehan). Also touches on the California Recall Election, Arnold, Enron, and the (past and future) looting of California's economy via energy deregulation. It lays out a clear map of the relationships between cadidates and the Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commision, and the Bilderberger Group; some of the key influences shaping our caustic foreign policy. A very worthwhile read.

Students Fight E-Vote Firm (Wired)
Some Swarthmore College students fighting hard to keep the Diebold memos available. By doing so, they put themselves at great risk fighting the DMCA: "They're using copyright law as a means of suppressing information that needs to be public," Smith said. ... "It's not like people are reading these memos in order to steal Diebold's election system. (The company is) trying to use this law, and specifically the mandatory take-down section, to conceal flaws that directly affect the validity of election results. This is a threat to our democracy."

Aid & Development: Iraq: the missing billions (electroniciraq.net)
"A staggering US$4 billion in oil revenues and other Iraqi funds earmarked for the reconstruction of the country has disappeared into opaque bank accounts administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the US-controlled body that rules Iraq. By the end of the year, if nothing changes in the way this cash is accounted for, that figure will double."

Unauthorized Diebold vote replacement led to TV networks calling race for Bush (BlackBoxVoting.org)
BOOM! Black Box Voting is back with some hard numbers on Diebold's involvement in the Florida 2000 election fraud.
If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on a second card (card #3) that mysteriously appeared, subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in some still undefined way, added 4,000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush, then, just as mysteriously, disappears. Black Box Voting reveals for the first time that it was the Volusia and Brevard County anomalies that caused TV networks to call the election for Bush. An internal document from CBS, combined with timelines and interviews from Agence France-Presse and internal Diebold memos show that:
- A replacement set of votes was uploaded on the Diebold machines (then called Global Election Systems) in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes.
- The original votes were on "copy 0" of the memory card containing the vote database. The replacement votes were tagged to a "copy 3."
- According to an internal memo written by Diebold Election Systems Sr. V.P. of Research and Development Talbot Iredale, the second set of votes should not have been done and may have been "unauthorized."
- In the replacement vote set, totals for all races were correct except for the presidential race.
- According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible for calling the election for Bush.
- Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election Systems (now Diebold) voting machines. Brevard omitted 4,000 votes for Gore from its tally, which contributed to the decision by the networks to call for Bush.
- The two erroneous county totals came directly from the central tabulating system
for the county. The GEMS program is Diebold's central tabulation software.
Ed Bradley sounded alarm bells over discrepancies in the data, but no one paid attention to him. CBS also ignored independent data from The AP; had CBS and the other networks used AP data instead of Voter News Service (VNS), they would not have called the election for Bush."

Scottie & Me - White House Briefing with Scott McClellan (Common Dreams)
Scott McClellan tries his hardest to avoid all of Russell Mokhiber's questions about the Texas Republican Party wanting NAFTA and GATT repealed and getting out of the United Nations & World Trade Organization... and then questions about Karl Rove declaring Joseph Wilson's wife to be "fair game."

US Army of God? General Casts War in Religious Terms (Common Dreams)
The top soldier assigned to track down Bin Laden and Hussein is an evangelical Christian who speaks publicly of 'the army of God.' "The former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," Boykin said last year. On at least one occasion, in June, Boykin said of President Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there." ... God? Well, it CERTAINLY wasn't the American voters who put him there.

Just Say No to Viruses and Worms (Wired)
Symantec COO, John Schwarz, is advocating "legislation to criminalize the sharing of information and tools online that can be used by malicious hackers and virus writers." Doesn't he realize that most of his company's engineers would end up in jail?

A Special TRAC Report: Criminal Enforcement Against Terrorists and Spies in the Year After the 9/11 Attacks (TRAC)
An excerpt from the October 15th Cryptogram Newsletter:

The Patriot Act and Mission Creep
One of the problems with laws is that the crimes that justify their passage are not always the crimes they are used against. In the United States, the RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations) law was passed to help fight organized crime, but was used against anti-abortion protesters and relatively minor drug offenders. And the Patriot Act, passed to help fight terrorism, is being used against a variety of other crimes. According to a TRAC report, definitions of "terrorism" have broadened considerably. The AP reports that the Justice Department admits that the Patriot Act has been used "to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists, and drug dealers." So someone with a pipe bomb in California is suddenly charged with "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction," and a North Carolina man who had a methamphetamine lab is suddenly charged with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. The Justice Department has even been conducting seminars on how to use the new wiretapping provisions in the Patriot Act in non-terrorism cases. It's a big deal. The guy with the meth lab could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that, under the old laws, was only worth about six months. The Patriot Act was hurriedly passed less than two months after 9/11 with almost no debate. That was a mistake, but it echoed the national mood about terrorism. Having the law applied broadly against common criminals is something that we shouldn't do lightly. Security is a trade-off, and the trade-offs in the Patriot
Act were extreme. Maybe treating drug dealers like terrorists is something Americans want. But we should debate it in public, and not let the Justice Department sneak it by us.

'Subversive' code could kill off software piracy (NewScientist)
Not likely... but an interesting approach to copy protection. Macrovision is introducing an anti-piracy scheme called "Fade" that causes pirated games to work correctly initially, but then purposefully develops more and more "bugs" over time. Although this is a novel approach to copy protection, it can clearly be filed with all the other copy protection schemes that work well until crackers learn how to defeat the new protection. Whether or not this brings them any more sales, I'd be interested in seeing.

36 Reasons To Vote For Bush and Republicans In 2004 (James Boyne)

Many soldiers, same letter (The Olympian)
"The Olympian recently received these two letters from area soldiers stationed in Iraq. The letters are identical and appear to be part of a campaign to present a positive picture of the U.S. occupation."
Justin Raimondo also wrote about this.

U.N. Establishes 'Do-Not-Bomb' List (Gene Callahan and Bob Murphy)
"Responding to growing public resentment over aggressive military campaigns, the United Nations today announced the release of a global "do-not-bomb list." A new UN resolution makes it a crime to drop bombs on the territory of any government or group that has put its name on the do-not-bomb registry. Meanwhile, military groups, soon to face fines of up to $11,000 per kiloton for violating the rules, vowed to heed the wishes of potential bombees while considering legal options that might overturn the system." ... bahahaha. Very funny parody of the do-not-call registry.

MoveOn.org: Investigate the White House (MoveOn)
Another great MoveOn petition: Attorney General Ashcroft must appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the White House's role in revealing an undercover CIA agent's identity. This act was a breach of national security and a felony and should be investigated by an independent party.

Questions are Raised on Awarding of Contracts in Iraq
"This New York Times article on the administration's wasteful spending in Iraq is a couple of days old, but well worth a read. Here are just a few examples of decisions being challenged by the Iraqi Governing Council: one, spending $20 million to buy new revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police when the military is confiscating tens of thousands of weapons every month from Saddam Hussein's abandoned arsenals; two, spending $1.2 billion to train 35,000 Iraqi police officers in Jordan when they could be trained in Iraq for much less and Germany and France have offered to do the same for free. Iraqis say there is strong evidence of corruption in the way contracts are awarded, some of them going to ex-supporters of Saddam. Members of the IGC are asking Congress to take a closer look: "There is mismanagement right and left, and I think we have to sit with Congress face to face to discuss this. A lot of American money is being wasted, I think. We are victims and the American taxpayers are victims." -Alternet Summary

AlterNet: A Call For Rove's Resignation
Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee asks for Karl Rove's resignation.

Former Boston FBI Agent Arrested (Wired)
"The former FBI handler of fugitive mobster James 'Whitey' Bulger was arrested Thursday in Florida and charged with the 1981 mob-related murder of a Tulsa, Okla., businessman"

How the CIA created Osama bin Laden
Today's History Lesson: Where did Osama come from?

The Mystery Missiles Found By The Poles In Iraq (Yigal Rosenberg / Rense)
This looks as though we've been caught trying to wrongly blame France for missles found in Iraq. Worse, this looks like a very poorly done job trying to frame France.

Evidence Of MMR Vaccine Risk Is 'Compelling' (Daily Mail - UK / Rense)
Compelling evidence of the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccines causing higher rates of autism and gut disorders. But campaigners claim authorities are trying to prevent the evidence being made public after legal aid was withdrawn from more than 1,000 families suing vaccine manufacturers. Legal aid bosses said yesterday that they were 'mistaken' to have backed the families' case, which has already received 15 million of taxpayers' money to help fund the research.

Arnold responds to Palast charges
"While the California press is reluctant to challenge the Austrian dumbbell lifter on anything more significant than his palm print on some females' behinds, one reader of our report below confronted Schwarzenegger. Friday, at a staged event in front of the Von's supermarket in Bakersfield, Referring to the disclosure in [Palast's] column (which would have been well known to the candidate by that time), she shouted, 'He's in bed with Kenny Lay, you idiots! It's your money!' There was dead silence for a beat, then came the voice through the loudspeakers, 'I suhtunly wasn't in bet wit YOU!' (While Arnold's proud new boorishness was a hit with the yahoos, the Terminator was stopped dead by his interlocutor's comeback which is simply too brilliant, dead-on accurate, and salacious to repeat on a family website.)"

Schwarzenegger Accused of Involvement in $9B California Swindle with Enron’s Ken Lay (Democracy Now!)
"Schwarzenegger has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001 he met with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay and convicted stock swindler Mike Milken in a hotel room in Los Angeles. The meeting was allegedly part of a plan to recall Gov. Gray Davis and replace him with someone who could make the legal threat go away."

Schwarzenegger-Ken Lay Meeting Emails Now Online (scoop.co.nz)
"Internal Enron e-mails confirm that Arnold Schwarzenegger was among a small group of executives who met with Ken Lay (of Enron) at the posh Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel in May of 2001, in the midst of California's energy crisis. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which obtained the e-mails, is calling on Schwarzenegger to acknowledge the meetings and disclose the information that was presented and discussed. The meeting with Enron occurred ten days after rolling blackouts darkened California for two consecutive days; Schwarzenegger has previously said that he does not remember such a meeting."

Extract: Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore (Guardian Unlimited)
Some short extracts from Michael Moore's new book, "Dude, Where's My Country?" "Answers please, Mr Bush. Michael Moore fired his opening salvo against George Bush and his rightwing cronies with his bestseller Stupid White Men. Now the president is in his sights again. In this second extract from his new book he asks his old enemy seven awkward questions"

GAO: Pentagon sold biolab gear (CNN)
"The Defense Department sold equipment to the public that can be used for making biological warfare agents, according to a draft report by the General Accounting Office." Whoops.

Gunmen kill Colombia candidate (BBC)
The election ballots in Columbia keep getting smaller and smaller. "Police in Colombia say a mayoral candidate, Jorge Roa, has been killed by armed men bringing the number of murdered political candidates to 16 in the run-up to elections later this month. Mr Roa is the seventh mayoral candidate to be killed during the election campaign. Eight people running for city councils and one candidate for governor have also been killed. Authorities blame the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Army of Colombia, or FARC, for most of the attacks." (Worth noting that the US seems to have some relationships with FARC.)

Briton held as terror suspect says CIA threatened torture (Guardian Unlimited)
"A British businessman arrested as a suspected terrorist has told the Guardian that US agents threatened him with beatings and rape in an attempt to break him. Wahab al-Rawi, 38, was denied a lawyer, held incommunicado for four weeks in Gambia, and repeatedly questioned by CIA agents before being released without charge. The account also challenges US denials of the use of torture or the threat of torture on terrorist suspects, thousands of whom have been detained and interrogated across the world."

Arnold Unplugged (Greg Palast / Guerrilla News Network)
Another Arnold scandal (and another, and another). This one is a real bombshell; Arnold's ties to Enron: "The wannabe governor has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken. Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits they carried off."

Weather Warfare: Washington's new world order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change (Michael Chossudovsky)
"In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP (see "Death Star") is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of conquest capable of selectively destabilising agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions. The High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) based in Gokoma Alaska --jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy-- is part of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry under the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating "controlled local modifications of the ionosphere"."

OLD: Who is behind the "Terrorist Network" in Northern Iraq (Michel Chossudovsky / globalresearch.ca)
This is in February 2003 before the Iraq war happened, and it makes a pretty good argument that Al-Qaeda terrorists that we're "hunting" are actually our a product of the CIA. This provides some insightful history to the complicated relationships between Washington, Northern Iraq, Baghdad, Al-Qaeda, and the CIA... "The presence and activities of Islamic fundamentalist groups in Northern Iraq largely serve US interests. These groups are committed to the establishment of a Muslim theocracy. In other words, they trigger political instability and contribute to weakening the institutions of the two dominant secular Kurdish parties, both of which have on occasion been involved in negotiations with Baghdad. In the wake of the war, the US is intent upon establishing a US military occupation government. The Northern region would be transformed into a US controlled protectorate." Hmmmm...

New al-Qaida threat: 15-ship mystery navy (WorldNetDaily)
Hmmm.... Al Qaida Navy? I remain skeptical.

Drug cop nabbed before police raid (news.com.au)
A clear-cut case of corruption in the War On Drugs. A detective was caught trying to burgle a home before his colleagues raided it. After the detective's arrest, his colleagues seized 200,000 ecstasy tablets, 2kg of a drug called ice, 5000 hits of LSD, chemicals, pill presses and $220,000 at the East Oakleigh home.

Sampson tells CBC of his torture by Saudi captors (CBC News)
Hrm... This certainly portrays Saudi Arabia in a negative light. This man was tortured for many days to force a (fake?) confession out of him. "Sampson said after five days of torture he begged to confess to being the mastermind behind a series of bombings aimed at westerners in Saudi Arabia. A few days more of torture and he confessed to being a British spy. Four other British men made similar confessions. "I don't believe they ever suspected us of being involved in the bombings. I think they were trying to find a convenient group of people to pin the bombings on that were not Saudi Arabian."" ... Tortue someone enough, and they'll confess that they're really the Easter Bunny.

Pinocchio rules: lies that are never questioned (Information Clearing House)
It sure is taking them a long time to plant WMDs...

Report: Grasso pressured firm to buy more AIG stock (The Globe and Mail)
Further dirt on Dick Grasso, proving that his grossly inflated compensation package wasn't the only reason for him stepping down as chairman of the NYSE. Grasso pushed the stock of a company whose owner was on Grasso's "compensation committee".

'Slime and Defend' (Paul Krugman / New York Times)
Paul Krugman with some helpful perspective on Karl Rove's outing of CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Digital-rights group knocks 'trusted' PCs (CNET)
A high-profile digital civil liberties group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, released a paper criticizing a component of the 'trusted computing' technology promoted by Microsoft, IBM and other technology companies, calling the feature a threat to computer users.

Sex, Lies and Videotape in DC and California, (Ron C. Coma / Democratic Underground)
A pretty good article outlining some of the media's hypocrisy.

Does a Felon Rove the White House? (AlterNet)
More on the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife by Karl Rove... "Allegations are swirling that Karl Rove, senior political adviser to President George W. Bush, may have committed a felony by blowing the cover of a CIA operative. CIA Director George Tenet has called on the Justice Department to investigate, but the White House said Monday that "President George W. Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role." And what makes this story even more remarkable is how seriously the Bush family has viewed outing intelligence operatives in the past."

IRS Makes Chilling Proclamation (Devvy Kidd)
"Since 1999, We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc., have petitioned the federal government to answer serious, legitimate questions regarding the legitimacy of the federal income tax and the deliberate misapplication of Title 26 against domestic Americans. Since 1999, not one single employee, agent or representative of the IRS or the DOJ have felt the need to answer the questions of the people. According to Johnston, Lemons said the government is answering our Petitions through "enforcement actions." The government will now answer legitimate petitions for redress of grievance under the First Amendment through the use of brute force because that's exactly what the IRS' "enforcement actions" amount to every day of the week. This statement by Mr. Lemons is chilling and should be the clarion call to every American out there who values freedom and believes that our rights, so articulately defined in the Bill of Rights, cannot be nullified or taken away by Mr. Lemons or any government official. The IRS has made the clear threat that if any American dares question their unlawful activities, the IRS will respond with "enforcement.""

BuzzFlash interview: Bev Harris (Working For Change)
A great interview with Bev Harris about the coming theft of the 2004 election... This interview has some very good summaries of the problems for those of you with short attention spans... "It's a conflict of interest, just as having military defense contractors involved in our voting system is a conflict. 'Conflict of interest' provides a motive to do something impure. Allowing secret code and combining it with conflict of interest is just playing with electoral fire."

Fresh bank scandals hit Iraq's leader in waiting (smh.com.au)
It seems Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's preferred candidate for Iraq, may not be the most respectable person for the job. Swiss authorities convicted Chalabi of false accounting in connection with the collapse of Socofi, an investment firm in Chalabi's widespread financial empire. Also, a Genevan bank linked to Chalabi, Mebco, had its banking license withdrawn by the Swiss fedral banking commision in 1989, causing the bank to collapse.

Energy Dept. Seeks Power to Redefine Nuclear Waste (New York Times)
It looks as though the Energy Department is looking to reclassify some of its nuclear wastes so that they don't have to bury it deep underground. This is raising a big stink because it places much of the burden of cleanup efforts on the State government. "The argument concerns tens of millions of gallons of salts and sludges left over from weapons production that are now in tanks in Idaho, South Carolina and eastern Washington. High-level waste is supposed to be encapsulated in glass for burial. The department has chosen Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the repository site, but the site has not yet opened and when it does, it will not be big enough for all the solidified wastes and spent reactor fuel."

Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century
Yay! Bev Harris has released the first two chapters (all of it on the way, soon) of her long-awaited book, Black Box Voting, for free download in either .pdf or .png format. Please, please read this book.