Hacking the Vote

July 2012

 

Hacking the vote

By Ronald Bleier

It wasn’t until some time after the passage of the Help America Vote Act in October 2002 that I was alerted to widespread election fraud, often by means of manipulation of the electronic vote count. If memory serves it was an article by Thom Hartmann reprinted in the summer of 2003 in the Progressive Populist, which alarmingly warned that due to the ease of hacking computerized voting machines, the electoral process was liable to subversion and that our democracy was at risk.

The first sentence of Hartmann’s article, “The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away” encapsulates the theme in a question: “Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive voting fraud?[i] The article emphasized that vote totals on these machines were unreliable because they could easily be gamed. Paper trails to verify the computer vote count were not available or simply mirrored the electronic count. Moreover the companies supplying the voting machines apparently all had ties to the Republican Party and thus had obvious partisan interests.

Later I learned that the new voting systems also made possible the hacking of central tabulating machines so that region wide and statewide results could be changed, again with no provisions for oversight or accountability. Another distressing development was the decline, especially in the mainstream media, of the acceptability of exit polls as a check on the reported vote. This devolutionary trend gained considerably after the 2004 election when exit polls showed Kerry winning in several critical states including Florida and Ohio. [ii]Since the official results showed Bush not Kerry winning, exit polls had to be downplayed, ignored or eliminated, at least from mainstream media notice.

Two remarkable anomalies

Among a number of anomalies, Hartmann cited two remarkable examples of Republican wins in Senate races that stuck in my mind as indicative of the threat that the new computerized voting regime represented. Perhaps the most worrisome thing overall was that no matter how clear to the general public that the tallies were manipulated and results flipped, there was no mechanism for accountability and no visible political leadership able or willing to ensure that the decisions of the electorate would prevail.

One of the examples Hartmann cited was Republican Chuck Hagel’s 1996 “stunning upset” win in the Senate race over popular former Nebraska governor Ben Nelson. In this first run for elective office, Hagel received 56% of the vote “winning virtually all demographic groups including many black precincts that had always voted Democratic in previous elections … and becoming the first Republican in twenty-four years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.” (Wikipedia). According to Neil Erickson, Nebraska’s deputy secretary of state, 85% of the Nebraska vote was counted by computer voting machines manufactured by ES&S (then called American Information Systems) chaired by Chuck Hagel until he resigned in March 1995, two weeks before he launched his Senate campaign. [iii]

Years later it was found that Hagel neglected to disclose that even after he stepped down as chairman of AIS, he held investments of between $1 and $5 million in the McCarthy Group which owns about 25% of ES&S according to Hagel’s chief of staff Lou Ann Lineham.[iv]

The numbers in Hagel’s successful re-election victory in 2002 over his Democratic opponent Charlie Matulka were even more remarkable — perhaps too remarkable to actually be credible. The official tally landed him with 82.7% of the vote. One could be forgiven for wondering whether such an outsized and unprecedented result was actually intended by the Hagel team or whether it wasn’t the result of a technical blunder made by overzealous or simply sloppy aides. In any event, despite Matulka’s loud protests there seemed to be no means of achieving a recount or enforcing any accountability.

A second notable example mentioned in the Hartmann article was the 2002 Georgia Senate race between Republican Saxby Chambliss and decorated Vietnam War veteran, Democrat Max Cleland. In 2002 Georgia was one of the first states to use only electronic voting machines statewide. Diebold Elections Systems provided virtually all of the Georgia voting machines. In the final pre-election poll Cleland led by five points and most observers expected him to win re-election handily.

In 2002 Chris Hood, a consultant for Diebold now known as Elections Solutions was on the ground helping prepare for the election. The votes cast on Diebold machines were stored on unprotected memory cards, which could easily be altered. These memory cards not only carried vote data, but they also carried programs and updates known as patches. As one of his responsibilities, Chris Hood was asked to place a software patch on machines in certain counties before the election. According to Hood, after he and his colleagues arrived at the warehouse, Bob Yerosovitch, the president of Diebold arrived with a stack of memory cards and announced that we needed to patch the machines because the clock wasn’t working properly. He also said that the State wasn’t to know about this.

When the actual votes were counted the Republican candidate, Saxby Chambliss, won by seven percentage points, a 12-point reversal, in a state that for the first time had deployed a 100% Diebold touch screen electronic equipment. [v]

 

A confusing interview

In the succeeding months and years, as more and more information regarding vote count manipulation and irregularities accumulated, I began to formulate a theory about a scene from the evening of the Bush-Gore election of 2000, that I later concluded was more than a minor footnote to the main event.

On the evening of November 7, 2000 shortly after the some of the networks announced that Florida and the presidency had been won by Democrat Al Gore, the TV cameras were invited to the Bush hotel suite in Florida where about a dozen family members were gathered to watch the election results. The atmosphere in the room, I recall, was calm, if not actually upbeat. The spokesperson — was it George W. Bush himself? -- said that despite the TV network predictions, the family wasn’t worried. He maintained that they had received information suggesting that the margin of victory was much narrower than current reports indicated, and the final result was far from clear.

In the end I came to the conclusion that Al Gore probably won Florida by a considerable margin, perhaps tens of thousands of votes, despite the presence of Ralph Nader on the ballot, and despite Governor Jeb Bush’s voter suppression tactics, including purging many thousands of likely Democratic voters from the rolls, etc. Why was the Bush family so confident that evening? What were their sources of information? I theorized that the Bush people controlled key local and central tabulating machines and they were in position to change electronic totals at will. 

In that case, why did they allow such a close result? I speculated that perhaps out of relative inexperience Republican operatives allowed the numbers to fall in such a way as to produce a virtual tie, instead of a clear margin of victory.

If that was their mistake, they made sure not to allow such an eventuality again. In the 2004 election, not only did they produce a sufficient victory margin in Florida, but they went over the top and gave Bush a winning margin of more than three million votes nationally, seemingly embarrassed that they had overlooked this detail in 2000.

My theory as to the underlying meaning of the Bush 2000 election night interview was spurred, I later realized, by some of the examples in Hartmann’s 2003 article. One of the saddest of such examples that Hartmann cited was the Alabama governor’s race in 2002, which many believed was stolen from incumbent Democrat Don Siegelman. His vote total in Baldwin County was originally given as 19,070, was sufficient for a narrow victory. Overnight, however, it was “discovered” that a “glitch in the software” had produced an error, and that Siegelman’s Baldwin County total was reduced to only 12, 736. Although Siegelman not unreasonably “claimed results were changed after poll watchers left” there was, apparently, no politically viable means to follow up on his claim, and he lost the race and the Governor’s mansion to his Republican challenger by 2,752 votes.

An even more striking example from the Florida 2000 presidential contest may well illuminate some of the means by which vote totals were manipulated electronically and the election result flipped.

The most famous example of election flipping occurred in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election in Florida when the tabulation system for Diebold's optical-scan system subtracted votes from Al Gore's total. While hanging chads distracted the nation, a few people noticed that in a Volusia County precinct where only 412 people voted, a Diebold system actually deleted votes for Gore, giving him minus 16,022 votes. Bush received 2,813 votes. Some news media had already called the win (PDF, see page 20) for Bush when someone noticed the numbers.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said the problem wasn't the machine but the result of someone uploading a second, faulty memory card to the county server after workers had already uploaded the real precinct results from another card.

"This error was immediately detected through normal auditing procedures, and the votes were re-tabulated," Bear wrote in an e-mail. [vi]

Could one be forgiven for imagining any number of other similar anomalies — some perhaps more deftly managed -- that escaped notice? Only a few of these together could have turned the election. Many such examples could have obscured a relatively large victory for Al Gore and the Democrats, and in the end changed history by settling extraordinary executive power on a team whose agenda, which up until that time, turned out to be arguably the most destructive in United States history.

***

---

[i]  AlterNet, July 30, 2003,  http://www.alternet.org/story/16474

[ii] Rick Holmes, Hacking the Vote, MetroWest Daily News (Mass.), June 17, 2012,  (h/t MCM)

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/editorspick_mobile/x1222856667/Holmes-Hacking-the-vote#ixzz1yGjVkOCw

[iii] Kim Zetter , “How E-Voting Threatens Democracy” Wired Magazine, March 29, 2004.

 http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/03/62790?currentPage=2.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] These three paragraphs are a summary when they are not an exact transcription of a two-minute video on youtube: “Saxby Chambliss Max Cleland 2002.”

[vi] Kim Zetter, note 3 above.

Bleier on Cashill: Did Obama write Dreams from My Father

My  12 page, 4,000 world article,  “Jack Cashill’s Expose: Who wrote Obama’s Dreams from My Father?” 

 is available on the DESIP website.

 http://desip.igc.org/desip/ObamasDreams.html

 The article is the first of a proposed two- part essay under the heading: “Searching for Obama.”

Except for part of the first paragraph, the selections copied below are from the final sections of the article.

***

Excerpts from:  

“Jack Cashill’s Expose: Who wrote Obama’s Dreams from My Father?”

                                                             by Ronald Bleier

In early 2011 on CSPAN’s Book TV program I watched author Jack Cashill present his controversial and startling theory regarding Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). Summarizing the findings he set out in his recently published Deconstructing Obama,[i] Cashill contended that Obama’s memoir was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers.

…

Authorship of Dreams-- A Matter of Importance?

The  question of whether Dreams from My Father  was ghostwritten or not rose above the trivial for me because  by early 2011 I had come to believe that President Obama had been relentlessly pursuing an extremist right-wing Republican agenda.   In foreign policy he continued and escalated the destructive militarism of his predecessors revealing a lack of compassion and ruthlessness that rivaled his bloody predecessors. I felt that Oliver Stone was not exaggerating when he termed President Obama “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” referencing his militarism and his efforts to scuttle Constitutional rights of due process. Domestically Obama has promoted and continues to favor a damaging program of austerity and tax cuts, including the more than a trillion in tax cuts that he has already pushed through in 2009 and 2010[ii]; with apparently more to come in 2012-2013.

The argument is that if President Obama has pursued these policies with the full awareness of the consequences for the economy and for his re-election (see below) it can be deduced that counterintuitively he prefers a hobbled economy, a weakened Democratic Party, an undermined and demoralized middle class—his base-- in order to pursue a Republican agenda of attacks on labor, the middle class, Social Security and Medicare.

Similarly his escalation and continuation of the drone strike program in Pakistan and Yemen is particularly egregious and telling. Critics of these attacks often point out that that a chief consequence of the program which reportedly kills more civilians than “militants” by a factor or 2 or 3 or 4 or more, is to radicalize the local population and in the end, create more “terrorists.” In other words, if the purpose of the drone program is counterterrorism, then the program is counterproductive—not to speak of its appalling destruction and the perilous precedent it sets for the future security of all nations.

Since these effects must be as plain to the White House as they are to critics, the implication is that Obama’s “anti-terrorism” rhetoric masks a more sinister program. The drone program seems designed to allow free rein to the most militaristic and aggressive elements of the U.S.’s national security state, embodied in Obama’s hawkish national security advisor, John Brennan. The evident intention of the deadly drone attacks—not to mention other regular and special forces U.S. military operations-- is to wreak havoc and destabilize vulnerable areas of the world as part of an endless war agenda favored by extremist hawks, neoconservatives and others.

Does Obama really wish to be re-elected?

If President Obama is a faux Democrat, a serial traitor to his party and to his core supporters, then it would be understandable if he were not wholly comfortable in his high profile leadership role. A second term would, among other things, only widen his exposure as a fraud, as the great deceiver,[iii] as the more effective evil[iv] as some are beginning to see.  Developments in a post 2013 Obama administration would continue to peel away at the veils of his deception.  If he leaves office after only one term, he would be leaving, relatively speaking, at the top of his game. 

If he left the White House in January 2013 he need have no fear as to the continuation of his political program since he has already made giant strides in institutionalizing an extremist right wing and totalitarian agenda. Due to the terrible and groundbreaking precedents of the past decade and more, a real Republican like Mitt Romney should have little trouble persevering on the road to heightened national and international instability, global unsustainability and more rigorous control everywhere from the top.

One sign that Obama is not deeply committed to a second term would be if his re-election campaign machine turns out to be not as smoothly run as it was in 2008. Could his June 2012 political faux pas, when he allowed that “the private sector is doing fine” be a sign of a lack of focus or interest?  More such blunders, as well as a campaign lacking in direction, could be signs of Obama’s inner intentions.

***

Read more:

 http://desip.igc.org/desip/ObamasDreams.html

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[i] Jack Cashill, Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President (2011).

http://www.booktv.org/Program/12215/Deconstructing+Obama+The+Life+Loves+and+Letters+of+the+First+Postmodern+President.aspx

CSPAN Book TV aired Jack Cashill’s book talk regarding his newly published, Deconstructing Obama in March 2011. The Book TV website offers the following summary of the Cashill presentation.

Jack Cashill questions whether President Obama wrote his memoir, Dreams from My Father.  Mr. Cashill argues that Barack Obama was assisted in the writing of his 1995 memoir by Bill Ayers and contends that the President's life story is different than the one presented in his biography.  Jack Cashill presents his argument at the Kansas City Public Library in Kansas City, Missouri.

[ii] Jack Rasmus, “Obama’s Economy,” Z Magazine, April 2012.

[iii] Yves Smith, “Barack Obama, the Great Deceiver,” May 14, 2012. (h/t Xymphora).

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barack-obama-the-great-deceiver.html

[iv] Glenn Ford: Why Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil, 3.21.12,  http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-barack-obama-more-effective-evil

Jonathan Simon: Did Scott Walker really win his recall vote?

NYU professor, author and election fraud activist, Mark Crispin Miller, distributed the commentary below by Jonathan Simon on the Wisconsin/Scott Walker recall vote. The main points are that the exit polls are as fishy as the actual vote count which is managed in secret by Republican leaning vote counting companies. Author Jonathan Simon doesn't mention it, but the  paper ballots accompanying the voting machines are rendered meaningless when the winning margin isn't close. No problem if your side is doing the "counting."

My guess is that this election was stolen just as were the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections to name just two.

***

Jonathan Simon

With the exit polls—as usual—”adjusted,” Walker “wins” Wisconsin! (Who’s surprised?)

http://markcrispinmiller.com/

June 6, 2012

From Jonathan Simon:

What we got tonight in Wisconsin was the same old stench, coming from the same old corner of the room. To wit, there was a huge turnout (highly favorable to the Democratic candidate Barrett), in fact they’re still waiting in line to vote in Milwaukee and elsewhere nearly two hours after poll closing; and the immediate post-closing Exit Polls had it a dead heat, 50%-50%. But the only place those polls were posted was as
 a Bar Chart in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Not a single network posted any Exit Poll numbers, though they all have been regularly posting them throughout the 2012 primary season within a few minutes of poll closing. But they all called the race “extremely tight,” since they were looking at the same 50%-50% Exit Poll that the Journal Sentinel at least had the courage to post in some format.

In short order, and quite predictably, the race was Walker’s, the networks anointing him the winner as the Exit Poll “Adjustment” Process played out. You could actually see it on the Journal Sentinel’s Bar Chart: the blue bars shrinking and the red bars lengthening every 20
 minutes or so. It will take a bit of visual measuring but the adjustment process was egregious, on the order of an 8-10% marginal disparity between the Unadjusted Exit Polls and the Adjusted Exit Polls congruent to the eventually-to-be-announced “official results.”

We’ve seen this before, election after election, the familiar “Red Shift.” And it’s the Exit Polls that are always “off,” because the Votecounts must always be “on.” Except that the Votecounts are secret and in the full control of outfits, with strong right-wing affiliations, like Dominion Voting and Command Central. Votes counted by partisans in complete secret–is this sane?

Today massive robocalls were reported to have been placed to targeted Barrett supporters, telling them they didn’t have to vote if they had signed the recall petition, and others that they couldn’t vote if they hadn’t voted in 2010. An obvious question: is there a bright ethical line between making (whoever actually made them) targeted robocalls telling your opponents’ supporters they don’t have to vote if they signed
 the recall petition versus setting the zero-counters on a bunch of memory cards to, say, +50 (for Walker) and -50 (for Barrett) so at the end
 of the day the election admin sees a “clean” election and you’ve shifted 100 votes per precinct? Do you believe that operators who have clearly not blanched at doing the first would for some reason blanch at doing the second–much neater and more efficacious as it is?

And if you’re thinking “well the pre-election polls predicted a Walker win,” you should know that the methodology for all of those polls, even
 the ones run by left-leaning outfits, was the Likely Voter Cutoff Model (google it, by all means), which disproportionately eliminates Democratic voters (students, renters, poor, minority) from the sample and so skews it conveniently anywhere from 5% to 10% to the right (the pollsters
 all would have been out of business by now if they had kept using a sound methodology and getting competitive elections wrong with it).

This election was dubbed “the second most important election of 2012;” it will “foretell” November just as the Massachusetts Special Senate Election (Coakley-Brown) “foretold” November 2010. And there was a massive red shift and even more than the usual indicators that it was rigged. Can anyone live with that, just give it a pass, and sleep tonight?

–Jonathan Simon

Is Obama AWOL on mortgage relief? Schneiderman replies

Is Obama serious about re-election? If so, why doesn't he show us?
by Ronald Bleier

  Daily News headline

Obama’s mortgage unit is AWOL

New York Daily News,  April 18, 2012,

MIKE GECAN AND ARNIE GRAF

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-18/news/31357043_1_schneiderman-mortgage-fraud-mortgage-unit/2

The title of the New York Daily News op-ed tells much of the depressing story. Almost three months after President Obama’s announced his latest plan to relieve struggling homeowners, two activists sought out New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who was appointed by President Obama to co-chair a new mortgage relief task force.

Mindful of Schneiderman’s reputation for standing up to pressure from the Obama administration, the authors of the op-ed, Mike Gecan and Arnie Graf, were among many who hoped that at long last, the president was indeed serious about “speeding assistance to homeowners.”  The authors remind us that there are reportedly 12 million homeowners who are a collective $700 billion underwater. We also learn that this latest task force, called the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities Working Group, is the sixth such mortgage task force created since Obama took office in 2009.

Their sad, but unsurprising, finding is that Obama’s use of the word “speed” is belied by contrary information. Interviewing Schneiderman in early March and then again in early April, the authors learned that the attorney general had traveled especially to Washington twice to oversee his task force responsibilities. Both times he found that there was “no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director for his task force.” The authors report that the total staff hired in all five previous groups was ONE.

As we stand in awe at the administration’s brazen chutzpah, it would seem difficult to exaggerate the implications of Obama’s inaction on an issue so fraught for the economy and for his re-election--but I’ll try. Obama’s handling of the mortgage issue is part of a larger pattern of willful neglect and is consistent with policies that suggest little or no White House interest in spurring the larger economy.

Chief among those polices has been President Obama’s continuation of the ruinous tax cuts of the previous administration.  Writing for Z Magazine, (April 2012) Jack Rasmus points out that Obama cut $300+ billion in taxes in 2009 and another $802 billion in 2010 (who knew?). At the same time, before the advent of the Occupy movement, he used his bully pulpit to echo Republican calls for austerity and deep budget cuts. (Among all the damaging reductions to non-military spending overseen by the president, is it too frivolous to point to current plans  to strip PBS of significant funding for some of its most popular cultural and political programming?)

A depressed economy predictably means trouble for the incumbent and his party. Thus the Obama administration’s pursuit in early 2009 of a relatively small stimulus designed to largely peter out by the end of 2010 and riven with tax cuts suggests that the large losses of Democratic Congressional seats in the fall 2010 elections may very well have been a case of failure by design.

Could it be that Obama is only pretending to be a Democrat? Is it possible, as Oliver Stone charged in January 2012 (in connection with Obama’s wars and his attacks on Constitutionally protected freedoms), that the president is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing?

If Obama is not really the sincere and focused Democrat that we supported, that could explain why we’re so disappointed and dispirited and why current polls suggest that his lead over Mitt Romney, the presumptive  Republican nominee, is minimal at best?

Schneiderman responds. 

Daily News headline

Attacking the foreclosure crisis

New York's attorney general pushes back on recent reports

 By Eric Schneiderman 

 New York Daily News April 26, 2012,

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/attacking-foreclosure-crisis-article-1.1067516

A week after the publication of the Gecan and Graff op-ed, Attorney General Schneiderman replied in the same forum with his own op-ed in the New York Daily News entitled, “Attacking the foreclosure crisis.”  Schneiderman’s rebuttal might have reminded readers that in their article, Gecan and Graf called on the attorney general, who they emphasized  “has acted boldly and honorably,” to resign from Obama’s “cynical arrangement.” They appealed to him to “go back to working effectively with fellow attorneys general in Delaware, Massachusetts and Nevada.”

Without specifying the authors by name, or mentioning their op-ed, Schneiderman explained that he was writing to correct recent “mischaracterizations” of the mortgage backed working group. Schneiderman reminded readers that  $7 trillion was lost in household wealth when the housing bubble burst.

As evidence of the president’s purposeful action, Schneiderman pointed to the administration’s request for an additional $55 million “to ensure that we have the resources to do a thorough job.” But this assertion, if anything, seemed to weaken his case. First of all, the appropriation must get through the House of Representatives, and if past is prologue, a wink and a nod from the White House will be more than sufficient, if necessary, to ensure that the Republican led House won’t pass such a measure even if they trouble to take it up. Moreover, if Obama was serious about adding such funds, why weren't these funds mentioned in January?

More directly rebutting Gecan and Graff's information, Schneiderman claimed  “more than 50 attorneys, investigators and analysts have already been deployed to support our investigations, with many more on the way.” Yet, once again, Schneiderman’s assertion raises more questions than it might seem to answer.

Skeptical readers might wonder if these new personnel actually exist, and if they do, have they been specifically attached to Schneiderman’s task force?  If so, were they deployed only in the last week, or have they been working on the issue for weeks if not months? In the latter case, why then did Schneiderman tell Gecan and Graf a different story in March and April?

In his op-ed, Schneiderman references an additional $15 million in funds from the “settlement” that his office succeeded in obtaining “to expand legal services and housing counseling” that were otherwise set to expire on April 1. Now, he writes, these services will be available for three more years.

Readers could be forgiven for wondering if the $15 million in presumably new money was sufficient to get Schneiderman on board to front for a president who once more has shown little action. Obama’s eloquence seems intended to mask his bewildering indifference to the trillions in homeowner losses and the consequent effects on the larger economy.

The episode is a reminder that an inspiring element of the Kennedy administration was the sense that it intended to unleash the talents and energy of the most dedicated Americans in many fields, not least in politics.  Today, as we head deeper into election season, we watch while President Obama seems to block the efforts of a spirited public servant and turn him into a party apparatchik.

Unfortunately it will take more than ringing pronouncements to convince us that the president and attorney general Schneiderman will make much progress as they attack the foreclosure crisis.

***

NB: For a distinctly less flattering analysis of Schneiderman’s  independence on the mortgage crisis issue, see nakedcapitalism. com, April 23, 2012..

"The Ministry of Truth Speaks: American Prospect Tries to Pass Off Mortgage Turncoat Schneiderman as Hero"

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/the-ministry-of-truth-speaks-american-prospect-tries-to-pass-off-mortgage-turncoat-schneiderman-as-hero.html

***

Obama, Zionism and Arbitrary detention (the NDAA)

Early in 2011 a colleague in a political chat group wrote that President Obama was a more virulent form of Bush. After some reflection, I concluded that my colleague wasn’t exaggerating; he was right in thinking that Obama was more dangerous than Bush because he was institutionalizing some of the worst policies of the previous administration. A striking example of President Obama’s ability to enact dangerous legislation is his quiet signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2011.

Obama’s last minute maneuver successfully minimized press coverage, as was its evident intention. Apparently the administration did not wish to highlight a contentious provision of the law which authorized the military to arrest anyone, including U.S. citizens and legal residents, and detain them, possibly for life if they were suspected of “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.”[i] The effect of the new legislation was to override the jurisdiction of the FBI, apparently in order to skirt the due process that would normally be accorded a detainee if the local police or the Justice Department were involved.[ii]

It’s worth emphasizing that granting the President the power of arbitrary arrest means an end to habeas corpus, the legal right of a defendant to demand that government present evidence justifying the arrest, an indispensable barrier to the tyranny of a police state. In addition, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out (“The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation, January 23, 2012), President Obama’s New Year’s Eve signature has also rendered a dead letter the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 intended to exclude the military from domestic law enforcement.

In the weeks before a bi-partisan Congress passed the NDAA into law by a Senate vote of 93-7 and by 283-186 in the House, President Obama threatened to veto the bill. Many were at first misled by this veto threat, thinking that Obama intended to defend the due process rights of U.S. citizens and others.  However, as it turned out, there was no such intention, and the President signed the bill with only minor changes, leaving its draconian and alarming provisions in full force.[iii]

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones of Infowars.com noted that the drive to remove longstanding protections came from the White House, not Congress. They point to a floor speech by Democrat co-sponsor Senator Carl Levin who said that it was the Obama administration “that demanded the removal of language that would have precluded Americans from being subject to indefinite detention.”

“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved…and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section,” said Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.[iv]

President Obama’s sweeping activism on this and other issues would seem to put into question conventional media characterization of him as a weak, compromising, reflective, sober, cautious, moderate executive. On the contrary, on this and many other national security and domestic priorities, he seems focused, manipulative, ruthless, even driven. In any event it may be useful to highlight the means by which the President has succeeded in implementing and “legalizing” such a radical policy as arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

As the leader of the Democratic Party President Obama can push through extremist legislation that a Republican president might find difficult or impossible to enact if only because of partisan politics. Obama’s chief enabler on the Senate side seems to be his reliable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who, at least in front of the TV cameras, never seems embarrassed by whatever may be demanded by the White House.

Less obvious but arguably just as important in enabling the relatively smooth passage of “anti-terrorist” legislation is the Israel Lobby—aka the Zionist Lobby or the Jewish Lobby. It was this same pro-Israel, anti-Muslim force that infuses the mainstream media as well as making up many of the top levels of the last three administrations that assisted in producing the unpopular and disastrous Iraq war. Since the Bush’s administration’s objective was regime change in the most powerful Arab  counterweight to Israeli area hegemony, they could count on the votes of even such liberal Senators as Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry and others for the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution.

Similarly, since the targets of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA policy are understood to be Muslim “terrorists,” policy makers in the Obama administration presumably considered that no perceptible hue and cry would materialize despite the apparent unconstitutionality of the law and its manifest danger to basic freedoms.

Powerful grassroots loyalty to Israel was anecdotally brought home to me not long ago in discussion with a Zionist friend when I argued that President Obama’s decision to employ drone attacks to assassinate an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 21 year old son in October 2011 in Yemen, were criminal acts and a disastrous precedent. My friend responded: “Well, you know, Ron, you and I have different views on these drone attacks.”

I gathered that in my friend’s view such people as had been targeted by the Obama administration —American citizens or not—were to be regarded as “terrorists,” since by definition they were engaged in a war against Israeli as well as U.S. interests. Thus in such cases, the President should be applauded for overriding Constitutional norms.

Author and activist Naomi Wolf expressed a good deal of the anger and frustration of many who felt betrayed by this extraordinary power grab. In a blog post she argued that history showed that there would be payback to those legislators who supported such autocratic legislation, since it was likely that they would be among the first to suffer its consequences.[v]

It might be comforting to find moral shelter in the prospect of such just retribution, but I suspect that an equally persuasive case could be made that as often as not the perpetrators and handmaidens of such villainy go unpunished and live out their lives in with dignity. If, however, in this particular case, Ms Wolf should prove correct, such a turnabout would require a very messy revolution, the likes of which could be expected to shatter many innocent lives along the way.

                  

Similarly, it would seem fruitless to remonstrate with Zionists—those who believe that a Jewish state should supplant the former Palestine—and argue that support for Israel is a pernicious influence on the politics, and on the democratic freedoms enjoyed for two centuries under the U.S. Constitution.  Such arguments might fall on deaf ears because it would be understood that measures like the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA are directed at those perceived to be Israel’s enemies. These enemies could include many who now are free to protest what they perceive as Israeli oppression. If legalization of indefinite detention in the U.S. helps to moderate or suppress such protests, it is, from their perspective, all to the good. Supporters of Israel are not the targets of the NDAA; they will not be the victims.

***

Postscript

As I was preparing the reflections above for distribution, I came across Glenn Greenwald’s blog that happened to be on a not dissimilar topic: the victims of the U.S.’s civil liberties assaults.[vi] Greenwald has no hesitation in identifying the victims: they are, he writes,  “racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals).” Interestingly he also points as I do to those who believe that they benefit from these assaults, although he is careful not to name them. Choosing his words carefully, he refers to  “those who dominate American political debates” and he explains that they “perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War.”

I thought it was remarkable that one of the most outspoken and widely read Left-wing bloggers seems to feel that it is the better part of valor not to specify Zionists, the Jewish Lobby, the Israel Lobby, the Zionist Lobby.   Perhaps he feels that he would not come out the winner from the backlash that such naming of names could produce.  In that case, his perception could be another indication of Zionist power. In any event, I respect his understanding of his self-interest.

Such reflections lead to consideration of such high profile figures on the Left as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis and others who, as far as I can tell, to this day seem to deny the power of the Israel Lobby to influence and direct U.S. Middle East policy.[vii] I gather that the reason for their position is that they view the U.S. as the mighty imperialist bully, the great font of evil. Thus, by definition a tiny client state like Israel cannot dominate the greater power in any meaningful regard.

And what are we to make of those pundits on the Left who smell the whiff of anti-Semitism in those who point to—or even mention—the existence of Jewish power (the title of a book it so happens by journalist and author, J.J. Goldberg)? Such Leftists seem to be acting as assistant enforcers, attempting to ensure that such notions are not permitted within the borders of serious policy debate.

In a recent article on “The Mess in the Middle East,” (Middle East Policy, Winter 2011) (former) Ambassador (to Saudi Arabia) Chas W. Freeman Jr. cited the 20 standing ovations, which a special session of Congress in May 2011 presented to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In his speech, Netanyahu had openly rebuked President Obama for his “1967 Border Plan” which had outlined a proposal to resolve key differences between Israel and the Palestinians. Freeman was outraged at the “spectacle of members of Congress bouncing up and down like so many obsequious yo-yos” which he saw as “irrefutable proof of Israel’s hammerlock on U.S. policy.” 

           

A measure of the depths to which U.S. political culture has fallen is that those who dominate American political debates were heartened, not dismayed, by the Congressional display.        

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[i] See Alexander Cockburn “The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation January 23, 2012, who points out that “associated forces” “can mean anything, as can the phrase, “directly supported,” referencing those alleged in support of terror groups. The substance of “directly supported,” writes Cockburn, “will adjust itself to the whim of any ingenious prosecutor.”

[ii] See Chris Hedges on Democracy Now (January 17, 2012) for press reports that the arbitrary detention provisions were opposed by elements of the security establishment “the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence.” “Journalist Chris Hedges Sues Obama Admin over Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens Approved in NDAA,”

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/17/journalist_chris_hedges_sues_obama_admin

Similarly, according to a New York Times editorial (“Politics Over Principal,” December 15, 2011) “Nearly every top American official with knowledge and experience spoke out against the provisions, including the attorney general, the defense secretary, the chief of the F.B.I., the secretary of state, and the leaders of intelligence agencies.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html?_r=4

[iii] Drilling down into the comments section of Naomi Wolf’s article—see Note 5 below—Roger Mattingly on January 1, 2012 illuminated the weasel wording of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA. He explains that while the bill seemingly inoculates U.S. citizens since it does not REQUIRE detention in those cases, yet it is PERMITTED.

[iv] “Obama’s NDAA Signing Statement Is Meaningless,” http://www.infowars.com/obamas-ndaa-signing-statement-is-meaningless/

[v]Naomi Wolf,  “How Congress is Signing its Own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill,” December 12, 2011.  http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

[vi] Glenn Greenwald, “”Who Are the Victims of Civil Liberties Assaults and Endless War?” January 16, 2012.  http://www.salon.com/2012/01/16/who_are_the_victims_of_civil_liberties_assaults_and_endless_war/singleton/

[vii]  An informed observer pointed out nuance among the three. He writes that while Chomsky dismisses the notion of a powerful Israel Lobby, “Bennis and Finkelstein  minimize its influence although Bennis had acknowledged that an attack on Iran would be a war for Israel and Finkelstein has admitted that the Lobby does shape US policy regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict but, ahistorically, believes it has ‘little influence on overall US policy in the Middle East.'”

Saving Iraq:? Allawi, Hitchens, Davies, etc

Saving Iraq?

The title of the December 28, 2011 New York Times op-ed by three Iraqi politicians: “How to Save Iraq From Civil War” (see below) and the editor’s pull quote: “Unless America pushes for a unity government, violence will destroy us,” ably summarizes the gist. It would seem that in order to get their op-ed printed, the authors had to pretend that that they believe that the U.S. actively wants Iraq to succeed. But as they well know that is not correct on at least three counts, the third being recent history.

First: Would a successful and independent Iraq be good for Israel?

Second: Would an independent Iraq cohere with the permanent war agenda of Bush-Cheney-Obama?

The relevant history

The history of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 has been one of great accomplishment from the occupiers’ point of view: the sectarian division of the country in order to insure civil war and the ongoing destruction of the country. Why else was Paul Bremer sent to head the occupation forces  in 2003 other than to oversee the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the de-Bathification Program, ensuring that  there would be no competent people to promote  the civil life of the country?  He was also  well-placed to oversee the dirty tricks and special forces operations which were responsible for the instability and sectarian warfare—which continues to this day.

Just this  week (12.22.11)  a series of coordinated terror attacks killed more than  60 people. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16297707)

Coordination in these cases is often the signature of the kind of competence and resource rich assets associated with professional operatives of  agencies like the CIA, known to the corporate (and almost all of the alternative) media as Al-Qaeda (al-CIA duh). Link TV, a cable TV news program in Arabic with English translation, interviewed a man in the Baghdad  street who asked in connection with this latest attack:  “Who wants to kill the Iraqi people? We need to know.”  

Questions to the late lamented Christopher Hitchens regarding the destruction of the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities in the early days of the U.S. invasion evidently hit a nerve because he answered uncharacteristically defensively (or maybe not so uncharacteristically when it came to Iraq) in his otherwise  brilliant memoir Htich-22 with a reply approximating Donald Rumsfeld’s response to similar questions: “Stuff happens.”

As good a writer and controversialist as Hitchens was, I couldn’t help noticing that he avoided evidence that  U.S. forces had the wherewithal to prevent looting had this been their mission; that they  were warned at very high levels months before the invasion to secure the Museum and other treasures; that military commanders on the ground made a point of allowing if not encouraging  mobs to trash the Museum and many other critical sites such as the University, government buildings, key infrastructure installations, etc.

One might have hoped that Hitchens’s enthusiasm for removing Saddam would have been tempered by clear evidence that regime change was only part of the larger purpose of destroying, for a very long time, the possibility of civil life for the Iraqi people. This was achieved largely by promoting civil war in Iraq, and torpedoing reconstruction, and ditto reconciliation. Similarly Hitchens gracelessly acknowledged and ineptly defended the charge that the Iraq invasion was a giant step towards permanent war.

Nicholas J.S. Davies, author of Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq in a timely nine-page summary of his book for Z Magazine  (January 2012) explains that it wasn’t the U.S. “Surge” that reduced the violence in Iraq. He writes: “In fact, U.S. occupation forces and their allies were the perpetrators of most of the violence in Iraq throughout the war, and their invasion and occupation of Iraq was the cause of all of it. It was therefore entirely possible at any point for the occupation forces to achieve a reduction in violence by scaling back their own operations, as they finally did after the ’Surge’ in 2008.”

Davies’s testimony helps us understand how to read the very last sentence of the NYT op-ed:

“Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.”

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“ How to Save Iraq From Civil War,”New York Times, 12.28,11

By AYAD ALLAWI, OSAMA AL-NUJAIFI and RAFE AL-ESSAWI

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition, was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5. Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament. Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

Ronald Bleier: Malthus and 7 Billion: Three Letters to the Media

 In October 2011 I posted a letter to the New York Review of Books regarding media references to Thomas Malthus in connection with world population reaching the 7 billion mark. In the end, I wrote three such letters to the NY media. Afterwards I decided to post all three letters within a little essay (about 3,500 words), which touched on population related issues. I also included reference to Malthus’s theory that the principle of population was the fundamental driving force that underlay the persistence of war in human civilization.

The article: "Malthus and 7 Billon: Three Letters to the Media" is available on the International Society of Malthus website:

http://desip.igc.org/malthus/Malthus7billion3Letters.html

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 In the following segment from my article I reflect on the broad, wall-to-wall, political spectrum arrayed against Malthus’s teachings.

Excerpt from “Malthus and 7 Billon: Three Letters to the Media”

Malthus Excoriated

 

Among the more powerful institutions arrayed against Malthusian views would seem to be the pro-natalist Catholic Church. To this day the Church opposes most forms of birth control and advocates unrestricted births and tacitly promotes the repression of women. One can surmise that their authoritarian and patriarchal policies derive from the perception that maintaining the immiseration and illiteracy of so many helps to promote the continuance of their wealth, power and influence.

Ironically or otherwise, the Catholic Church is joined in its refusal to address the consequences of nature’s limits by many on the left including socialists, Marxists and many anarchists who believe that considerations of ever clearer signs of nature’s backlash is not the proper way to look at the problem. Rather they are disposed to believe in “systemic” approaches, with each sectarian element favoring one “system” or another. They tend to start from the fundamental notion that by some means or another—nature, God, etc.—there will always be sufficient supply of food and the means of subsistence. The answer they believe is the implementation of fair and just systems of distribution.

Yet, from a Malthusian perspective, too often such “systems” seem to ignore the day-to-day costs of production and distribution and the requirement to somehow pay for those costs. Many seem to ignore the imperatives of scarcity that drive powerful individuals and institutions to secure the interest of elites at the expense of the rest.  In Malthusian theory, such traits evident in the rich and powerful as unrestrained selfishness, ruthlessness and unmotivated malignancy are symptoms rather than the fundamental causes of evil and misery.

Karl Marx saw Malthus’s teachings as a threat to his own desiderata of a more or less equal per capita division of resources and he favored a system outlawing private property in favor of communal ownership. In all his writings, Marx only devoted about a page of vituperation to Malthus, excoriating him as a plagiarist and as a stooge of the privileged, especially the landed gentry. Marx’s collaborator, Fredrich Engels, at least had the self-assurance to address the central issue Malthus raised of limits to growth. According to Engels, Malthus was proved wrong by the very existence of the lands west of the Mississippi River, which, he believed, demonstrated that humanity would never be bound by an insufficiency of resources.

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Read More

http://desip.igc.org/malthus/Malthus7billion3Letters.html