| PEACE ACTION FOR A SANE WORLD YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO AFFILIATE people@paytown.org |
| ABOUT PEACE ACTION The merger of SANE & The Nuclear Freeze, we have effectively mobilized for peace and disarmament for nearly fifty years. Peace Action Youngstown, the local affiliate, began as Peace Council in 1981. As the nation’s largest grassroots peace group we get results: from the 1963 treaty to ban above ground nuclear testing, to the 1996 signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, from ending the war in Vietnam, to blocking weapons sales to human rights abusing countries, and eliminating funding for new nuclear weapons, Peace Action and its 100,000 members have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of the international movement for peace. We are proof that ordinary people can change the world. At Peace Action we believe...... that war is not a suitable response to conflict. For nearly 50 years Peace Action has worked for an environment where all are free from violence and war. We understand that long standing global conflicts require long-term solutions, and that US foreign policy has a lasting effect on the world. We are working to promote a new US foreign policy that is based on peaceful support for human rights and democracy, reducing the threat from weapons of mass destruction, and cooperation with the world community. We are against pre-emptive war, and call for a full withdrawal of American troops from Iraq ....that every person has the right to live without the threat from nuclear weapons. There are still over 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The US and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons, on hair trigger alert— ready to launch in minutes. While the Cold War may have ended, the nuclear threat has not. The only way to ensure that nuclear weapons will never be used - whether purposefully, or accidentally - is global abolition. The U.S. must lead the way to a safer world by taking our weapons off hair trigger alert, halting our research and development of new nuclear weapons and disarming and demilitarizing our warhead stockpile of over 10,000 nuclear warheads. We can reduce the threat to the world posed by nuclear weapons, but we must start by getting serious about getting rid of our own weapons of mass destruction.... that America has the resources to both protect and provide for its citizens. As the Pentagon’s budget soars to $400 billion, 17% of American children live in poverty. Basic infrastructure is crumbling, school are using outdated textbooks, and millions of Americans are without basic health insurance. For what the US will spend on the War in Iraq, 26,701,621 children could have attended a year of Head Start, we could have built 1,815,194 additional housing units for the poor, we could have hired 3,493,706 additional public school teachers for one year, and we could have provided 9,772,998 students four-year scholarships at public universities (source – National Priorities Project). We believe that these are priorities that should come before war. What we do at Peace Action… We are the nation’s largest grassroots Peace network, with over 28 state affiliates, and over 100 local chapters. We organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, internet actions, citizens lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and, as a Leading organizing member of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals. Through our Peace Voter awareness campaigns, we inform citizens about their choices for both local and national campaigns, by highlighting different candidates’stances on issues relating to peace. Our annual Congressional Voter Guide gives credit to those in Congress who voted for a peaceful future, while holding accountable those who voted for larger Pentagon budgets, spending tax dollars on nuclear weapons, and voted for wars of aggression and occupation. Given the right tools, ordinary people can change the world. At Peace Action, we recognize that real change comes from the bottom up and we are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level. When you join, you become part of an effective citizen movement. We work hard to keep you informed through our quarterly newsletter and publications about the most important news and issuesin the peace movement. As a member you can join our Action Alert Network which allows citizens throughout the country to rapidly respond to important legislation online; you can become an important part of a fast growing national movement, and help us change the direction of our country and the world towards a more sustainable, peaceful future. |
| Our affiliate is a 501 c3 organization supported by membership, fundraisers, underwriters, volunteers and YOU. Your donations and/or participation at educational outreach programs and events will help us contribute towards making a better world possible. Contact us by phone or email. We welcome feedback about this webpage. Thankyou. |
| Join us by going to Nat'l Peace Action Site above and clicking on the "PEACE VOTER PLEDGE" Sign on & make the following commitment: "I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign. |
| Open Letter to the People of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Martin Luther King, Jr. To the People of Lebanon, of Palestine, and of Iraq, and to those who stand for peace in Israel , From People in the United States Who Believe that Only Justice Will Bring Peace Dear Sisters and Brothers Living With War, We write to you in anguish, to express what cannot possibly be contained in words. We need a new language to speak about what humanity means and still can mean, what our humanity must create in this danger. We send our solidarity, our commitment, our love. We write to let you know that there are many in this country who are organizing, educating, protesting, and engaging in civil disobedience, working night and day to call for an end to this horror, to change US policy and reverse complicity in Israel's war,working for recognition of your sovereignty, your rights, your lives, your truths. We are filled with anger at the US role in supplying Israel with weapons - in violation of the government's own Arms Export Control Act - and at US policies that gave Israel more time to continue its attacks. We are women and men of all ages, from all parts of the country, all professions, all faiths, all races, all national backgrounds. We are not reflected in the mainstream media because of the stronghold of fear and lack of information strangling the imagination and collective public voice of this country. But we are here and we want you to know you are not alone. We work in small community groups, in nationwide coalitions, in places of worship and as artists, writers, teachers -- from all walks of life. We want you to know that when we see and hear the news we are imagining your families, your homes, your hearts, your hopes, your terror. We want you to know. We grieve for all lives lost in the Middle East, believing that all lives are precious and equal, whatever the race or creed. We are working hard for peace with justice. The pro-war forces arrayed against us are far more powerful than us. The road to peace is far too long, and many will suffer. But we vow to do all we can to bring an end to the US role in this violence. * We are putting pressure on our elected representatives to support a continued ceasefire and then negotiate a just peace. Although the war on Iraq still produces its unbearable toll of daily death, many more voices in Congress oppose the war since we came together to try to prevent the war and then to oppose it. And although Congress still expresses its misguided and uncritical support for Israel's actions in Palestine and Lebanon, our efforts have contributed to unprecedented debates on the causes of conflict. And we will not give up. * We are educating US citizens on the consequences of our Government's foreign policy. We organize teach-ins in places of worship, trade unions, schools and other public forums. We ground our teaching in universal human rights and international law. Many of us promote the call to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it upholds international law, as called for by Palestinian civil society in July 2005 and by Lebanese cultural figures in July 2006. * We seek to give voice to the suffering and the steadfastness of the people of Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon, and to the stand taken by Israeli and US citizens who refuse to serve in armies of occupation and who work for justice and peace. * We seek as well to expose and redeem the damage to our own country. We know that militarism destroys our economy, our communities and our humanity. We know that many who fight our government's wars are the young and poor who feel they have no other options. We know that our schools, our jobs, our democracy, and our civil rights are held hostage to the military economy that currently drives our government. Our struggle is thus one of solidarity, not of charity. We take our protests to the streets in demonstrations and vigils - outside Israeli Consulates, US Federal Buildings, and in all public spaces. We cannot remain silent and simply let our countrymen and women watch other countries and other peoples burn. We will work until our country stands for peace and justice in yours and throughout the world. Signed by the following organizations The Steering Committee and Staff of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a nationwide coalition of 200 groups and organizations United for Peace and Justice, a nationwide coalition of 1,400 organizations including Peace Action for a Sane World. |
| Yes! I join with the majority of US citizens, the people of Iraq, and people around the world in calling for a comprehensive end to the US war in Iraq. |
| 20,000 US TROOPS INJURED The trends in U.S. casualties suffered in Iraq through August continued into September. The rate at which U.S. troops were being killed continued to slowly fall, but the rate at which injuries were suffered, including serious ones, continued to rise. And since the beginning of this month, U.S. casualties in the war have passed another grim benchmark: More than 20,000 U.S. troops have now been wounded while serving in Iraq. US GENERAL SAYS ATTACKS AGAINST AMERICANS TROOPS HAVE INCREASED Attacks against U.S. troops have increased following a call earlier this month from al-Qaida in Iraq's leader to target American forces, the top U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday. An Iraqi police headquarters in Baghdad was hit by a suicide truck bomb, killing at least seven people in a deadly 24-hour period that saw more than 45 killings throughout Iraq, authorities said. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell also that Iraqi and American troops were expecting violence to increase further during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which begins next week. The attacks against U.S. troops were mostly carried out by suicide car bombers or roadside bombs. He added that the number of killings by death squads also had increased n the past week. AMERICA IS ALIENATING THE REST OF THE WORLD: POWELL The former US secretary of state Colin Powell has accused the White House of pursuing policies in the "war on terror" that have put America out of step with The rest of the world. In a rare public breach with the administration, Mr Powell told an audience in Norfolk, Virginia, on Tuesday that he opposed White House plans to redefine America's commitment to sections of the Geneva convention protecting detainees from torture and degrading treatment. |
| DON'T SHUT UP- STAND UP. |
| ABOVE WALLPAPERS AVAILABLE AT PEACETAKESCOURAGE.COM |
| An Archetypal American Hero Statement on Behalf of Lt. Ehren Watada By FRANCIS A. BOYLE One generation ago the peoples of the world asked themselves: Where werethe "good" Germans? Well, there were some good Germans. The Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the foremost exemplar of someone who leda life of principled opposition to the Nazi-terror state even unto death. Today the peoples of the world are likewise asking themselves: Where are the "good" Americans? Well, there are some good Americans. They are getting prosecuted for protesting against illegal U.S. military interventions and war crimes around the world. First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is America's equivalent to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Wei Jingsheng, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others. He is the archetypal American Hero whom we should be bringing into our schools and teaching our children to emulate, not those wholesale purveyors of gratuitous violence and bloodshed adulated by the U.S. government, America's power elite, the mainstream corporate news media, and its interlocked entertainment industry. In international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, because of its formulation and undertaking of wars of aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity,and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany. As a consequence, American citizens and soldiers such as Lieutenant Watada possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the U.S. Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance in order to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by U.S. government officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism. If not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU |
| Be it Resolved: You Can Impeach the President OFFICIAL IMPEACHMENT TEXT WHEREAS, Jefferson's Manual section LIII, 603, states that impeachment may be set in motion by charges transmitted from the legislature of a State; and WHEREAS, George W. Bush has intentionally misled the Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war against Iraq, in violation of Title 18 United States Code, Section 1001 and intentionally conspired with others to defraud the United States in connection with the war against Iraq in violation of Title 18 United States Code, Section 371; and WHEREAS, George W. Bush has admitted to ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of American civilians without seeking warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, duly constituted by Congress in 1978, in violation of Title 50 United States Code, Section 1805; and WHEREAS, George W. Bush has conspired to commit the torture of prisoners in violation of the UN Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention, which under Article VI of the Constitution are part of the "supreme Law of the Land"; and WHEREAS, George W. Bush has acted to strip Americans of their constitutional rights by ordering indefinite detention of citizens, without access to legal counsel, without charge and without opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation by the President of a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant", all in subversion of law; and WHEREAS, In all of this George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, subversive of constitutional government to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the State of ___________ and of the United States. Be it resolved that George W. Bush, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.. |
Published on Thursday, September
21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Joe Stalin is
Alive and Living
on Pennsylvania
Avenue
by Danny Schechter
Think of it this way.
You are a former cold warrior
who spent your youth studying
every aspect of the old Soviet
Union. Even though you hated
their policies publicly,
you began privately,
first grudgingly and then,
with time, enthusiastically,
admire the way they operated.
They were so organized
and adept at imposing their
agenda with top -down control.
They were, in words
used at the time,
'masters of deception"
and pursued secretive
strategies of infiltrating
ideologues and mole-like
operatives --known as
apparatchiks-into
government agencies
and military organs.
Their KGB danced circles
around our CIA and when
their often-innocent "suspects"
were interrogated, they were
tortured with no restraints.
The KGB made sure of that.
Now the CIA does our dirty work
and the President is crusading
to lift any and all restraints
from their extreme electrode
units. They killed their
anti-communist "enemies"
outright after convicting
them in kangaroo courts.
We just detain ours
indefinitely while demonizing
them as terrorists beyond
the protection of the law.
Their Party imposed "message
control" and ran media with
carrots and sticks.
Our Republican Guard uses
perception management
techniques to achieve
the same results.
They marveled at how controlled
everything was. And so they built
a machine just like the one they
"hated" even as the old order
of the CCCP went down the
tubes of history.
They invaded Afghanistan.
We invaded Afghanistan.
They wiretapped.
We wiretapped.
They had secret police.
We have secret police in
the form of contractors and
companies like Blackwater.
They used propaganda.
We made ours better.
They had a party line.
We have a party line.
Theirs was blatant;
ours is less visible.
They were said to want
to conquer the world.
Now, most of the world
says that about us.
In the old days,
today's neo-cons
denounced Communist
plans for world domination.
Now they have their own.
In the same way that cops
often make the best criminals
with many believing that many
who joined the police would have
just as comfortably have signed up
with the mafia (and some did both)
-- many of the professional
anti-communists were just as
authoritarian and dogmatic in
their instincts.
Back, there were studies of
"authoritarian personalities."
Among their alleged traits:
1. They travel in tight circles
of like-minded people.
2. Their thinking is more likely
based on what authorities have
told them rather than on their
own critical judgment, which
results in their beliefs being
filled with inconsistencies.
3. They harbor numerous double
standards and hypocrisies.
4. They see the world as a
dangerous place, with society
teetering on the brink of
self-destruction from evil
and violence, and when
their fear conflates with
their self-righteousness,
they appoint themselves
guardians of public morality,
or God's Designated Hitters.
5. They think of themselves as
far more moral and upstanding
than others."
A Description of Stalinists?
Perhaps. But Former Nixon
lawyer John W. Dean uses these
very categorizations to describe
today's "conservatives" in his
book, "Conservatives Without
Conscience'
Which brings us to our modern
day Busheviks, today's Bolshevik
wannabes with a more
sophisticated rap and deadly
impact. Some are former leftists
turned rightists who are now as
comfortable in defending torture
and abuse as the agencies they
used to denounce. What went
around is back again under a
different name.
Just as the Neo-Nazis are back
as newly elected respectable
members of governments in
Eastern Germany, abandoning
the skinhead look for suits and
ties and softer rhetoric, our Neo
Cons have moved from left to
hard right wrapped in burkas
made of the American flag.
They have borrowed the
techniques of their old enemies
as Cheryl Seal wrote back in 2001:
"Joseph Stalin was successful
in seizing and retaining power
primarily because he was able to
stack the Politburo with politicians
as extreme as himself and to
dictate their actions and their
votes on every issue. Party
dissenters were harassed
mercilessly by the Politburo
members who remained blindly
loyal to Stalin. With a block of
supporters who did not think for
themselves, Stalin was able to
completely reverse Russia's
policy on a number of key issues,
right across the board.
For example,
in 1936, he completely reversed
the liberal communist doctrines
pertaining to family, divorce,
and abortion. He made divorce
difficult, made abortion illegal,
and stressed "family values" [do
we see a 'dictator pattern' here?].
Stalin's propagandists used a
three-point strategy to convince
the Russian people that things
in Stalin's policy that were in fact
extremely bad for the country
(including the systematic round up
and extermination of all "enemies
of the state") were in fact "good."
Point One: Create arguments that
how the negative thing is actually
NOT bad, but is actually good.
[Present day ex:
convincing people that
greenhouse gases will
give us lush green plants,
not fry the planet].
Point Two: Show how the negative
thing is actually not true.
[Present-day ex:
Global warming does not exist].
Point Three: Show that the
negative thing is actually being
caused by "enemies of the state"
- most likely liberals. [Present-day
example: We can't sign Kyoto
because it is really a plot to
ruin our economy]."
And so the parallels continue to
surface -never exact but certainly
suggestive -- as recently as today
when we learned that unelected
professional "cadre" of the hard
right-not merely members of the
GOP -- enjoyed unique access to
the White House as AP reports:
"Republican activists Grover
Norquist and Ralph Reed landed
more than 100 meetings inside
the Bush White House,
according to documents released
Wednesday that provide the first
official accounting of the access
and influence the two presidential
allies have enjoyed.'
Finally, ponder the words of Nikita
Khrushchev who first exposed
the crimes of Stalin back in l956:
""Everyone can err, but Stalin
considered that he never erred,
that he was always right. He never
acknowledged to anyone that he
made any mistake, large or small,
despite the fact that he made not
a few mistakes in the matter of
theory and in his practical activity."
Who today will take off their shoes
to bang on a table at the UN about
the crimes of our Busheviks?
News Dissector Danny Schechter
is blogger in chief of
Mediachannel.org.
His latest film is "In Debt We Trust"
(Indebtwetrust.com) Comments to
Dissector@mediachannel.org
21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Joe Stalin is
Alive and Living
on Pennsylvania
Avenue
by Danny Schechter
Think of it this way.
You are a former cold warrior
who spent your youth studying
every aspect of the old Soviet
Union. Even though you hated
their policies publicly,
you began privately,
first grudgingly and then,
with time, enthusiastically,
admire the way they operated.
They were so organized
and adept at imposing their
agenda with top -down control.
They were, in words
used at the time,
'masters of deception"
and pursued secretive
strategies of infiltrating
ideologues and mole-like
operatives --known as
apparatchiks-into
government agencies
and military organs.
Their KGB danced circles
around our CIA and when
their often-innocent "suspects"
were interrogated, they were
tortured with no restraints.
The KGB made sure of that.
Now the CIA does our dirty work
and the President is crusading
to lift any and all restraints
from their extreme electrode
units. They killed their
anti-communist "enemies"
outright after convicting
them in kangaroo courts.
We just detain ours
indefinitely while demonizing
them as terrorists beyond
the protection of the law.
Their Party imposed "message
control" and ran media with
carrots and sticks.
Our Republican Guard uses
perception management
techniques to achieve
the same results.
They marveled at how controlled
everything was. And so they built
a machine just like the one they
"hated" even as the old order
of the CCCP went down the
tubes of history.
They invaded Afghanistan.
We invaded Afghanistan.
They wiretapped.
We wiretapped.
They had secret police.
We have secret police in
the form of contractors and
companies like Blackwater.
They used propaganda.
We made ours better.
They had a party line.
We have a party line.
Theirs was blatant;
ours is less visible.
They were said to want
to conquer the world.
Now, most of the world
says that about us.
In the old days,
today's neo-cons
denounced Communist
plans for world domination.
Now they have their own.
In the same way that cops
often make the best criminals
with many believing that many
who joined the police would have
just as comfortably have signed up
with the mafia (and some did both)
-- many of the professional
anti-communists were just as
authoritarian and dogmatic in
their instincts.
Back, there were studies of
"authoritarian personalities."
Among their alleged traits:
1. They travel in tight circles
of like-minded people.
2. Their thinking is more likely
based on what authorities have
told them rather than on their
own critical judgment, which
results in their beliefs being
filled with inconsistencies.
3. They harbor numerous double
standards and hypocrisies.
4. They see the world as a
dangerous place, with society
teetering on the brink of
self-destruction from evil
and violence, and when
their fear conflates with
their self-righteousness,
they appoint themselves
guardians of public morality,
or God's Designated Hitters.
5. They think of themselves as
far more moral and upstanding
than others."
A Description of Stalinists?
Perhaps. But Former Nixon
lawyer John W. Dean uses these
very categorizations to describe
today's "conservatives" in his
book, "Conservatives Without
Conscience'
Which brings us to our modern
day Busheviks, today's Bolshevik
wannabes with a more
sophisticated rap and deadly
impact. Some are former leftists
turned rightists who are now as
comfortable in defending torture
and abuse as the agencies they
used to denounce. What went
around is back again under a
different name.
Just as the Neo-Nazis are back
as newly elected respectable
members of governments in
Eastern Germany, abandoning
the skinhead look for suits and
ties and softer rhetoric, our Neo
Cons have moved from left to
hard right wrapped in burkas
made of the American flag.
They have borrowed the
techniques of their old enemies
as Cheryl Seal wrote back in 2001:
"Joseph Stalin was successful
in seizing and retaining power
primarily because he was able to
stack the Politburo with politicians
as extreme as himself and to
dictate their actions and their
votes on every issue. Party
dissenters were harassed
mercilessly by the Politburo
members who remained blindly
loyal to Stalin. With a block of
supporters who did not think for
themselves, Stalin was able to
completely reverse Russia's
policy on a number of key issues,
right across the board.
For example,
in 1936, he completely reversed
the liberal communist doctrines
pertaining to family, divorce,
and abortion. He made divorce
difficult, made abortion illegal,
and stressed "family values" [do
we see a 'dictator pattern' here?].
Stalin's propagandists used a
three-point strategy to convince
the Russian people that things
in Stalin's policy that were in fact
extremely bad for the country
(including the systematic round up
and extermination of all "enemies
of the state") were in fact "good."
Point One: Create arguments that
how the negative thing is actually
NOT bad, but is actually good.
[Present day ex:
convincing people that
greenhouse gases will
give us lush green plants,
not fry the planet].
Point Two: Show how the negative
thing is actually not true.
[Present-day ex:
Global warming does not exist].
Point Three: Show that the
negative thing is actually being
caused by "enemies of the state"
- most likely liberals. [Present-day
example: We can't sign Kyoto
because it is really a plot to
ruin our economy]."
And so the parallels continue to
surface -never exact but certainly
suggestive -- as recently as today
when we learned that unelected
professional "cadre" of the hard
right-not merely members of the
GOP -- enjoyed unique access to
the White House as AP reports:
"Republican activists Grover
Norquist and Ralph Reed landed
more than 100 meetings inside
the Bush White House,
according to documents released
Wednesday that provide the first
official accounting of the access
and influence the two presidential
allies have enjoyed.'
Finally, ponder the words of Nikita
Khrushchev who first exposed
the crimes of Stalin back in l956:
""Everyone can err, but Stalin
considered that he never erred,
that he was always right. He never
acknowledged to anyone that he
made any mistake, large or small,
despite the fact that he made not
a few mistakes in the matter of
theory and in his practical activity."
Who today will take off their shoes
to bang on a table at the UN about
the crimes of our Busheviks?
News Dissector Danny Schechter
is blogger in chief of
Mediachannel.org.
His latest film is "In Debt We Trust"
(Indebtwetrust.com) Comments to
Dissector@mediachannel.org
The Bushes
and the Truth
About Iran
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Thursday 21 September 2006
Having gone through the
diplomatic motions with Iran,
George W. Bush is shifting
toward a military option that
carries severe risks for American
soldiers in Iraq as well as for long-
term U.S. interests around the
world. Yet, despite this looming
crisis, the Bush Family continues
to withhold key historical facts
about U.S.-Iranian relations.
Those historical facts - relating to
Republican contacts with Iran's
Islamic regime more than a quarter
century ago - are relevant today
because an underlying theme in
Bush's rationale for war is that
direct negotiations with Iran are
pointless. But Bush's own father
may know otherwise.
The evidence is now persuasive
that George H.W. Bush
participated in negotiations with
Iran's radical regime in 1980,
behind President Jimmy Carter's
back, with the goal of arranging
for 52 American hostages to be
released after Bush and Ronald
Reagan were sworn in as Vice
President and President,
respectively.
In exchange, the Republicans
agreed to let Iran obtain U.S.-
manufactured military supplies
through Israel. The Iranians kept
their word, releasing the hostages
immediately upon Reagan's
swearing-in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the next few years, the
Republican-Israel-Iran weapons
pipeline operated mostly in secret,
only exploding into public view
with the Iran-Contra scandal in late
1986. Even then, the Reagan-Bush
team was able to limit
congressional and other
investigations, keeping the full
history - and the 1980 chapter -
hidden from the American people.
Upon taking office on Jan. 20,
2001, George W. Bush walled up
the history even more by issuing
an executive order blocking the
scheduled declassification of
records from the Reagan-Bush
years. After 9/11, the younger
George Bush added more bricks to
the wall by giving Presidents, Vice
Presidents and their heirs power
over releasing documents.
Impending War
But that history is vital today.
First, the American people should
know the real history of
U.S.-Iran relations before the Bush
administration launches another
preemptive war in the Middle East.
Second, the degree to which
Iranian officials are willing to
negotiate with their U.S.
counterparts - and fulfill their
side of the bargain - bears on
the feasibility of talks now.
Indeed, the only rationale for
hiding the historical record is
that it would embarrass the Bush
Family and possibly complicate
George W. Bush's decision to
attack Iran regardless of what
the American people might want.
The Time magazine cover story,
released on Sept. 17, and a new
report by retired Air Force Col.
Sam Gardiner - entitled "The End
of the 'Summer Diplomacy'" - make
clear that the military option
against Iran is moving rapidly
toward implementation.
Gardiner, who taught at the
National War College and has war-
gamed U.S. attacks on Iran for
American policymakers over the
past five years, noted that one of
the "seven key truths" guiding
Bush to war is that "you cannot
negotiate with these people."
That "truth," combined with
suspicions about Iran's nuclear
ambitions and Tehran's
relationship with Hezbelloh and
other militant Islamic groups, has
led the Bush administration into
the box-canyon logic that war is
the only answer, despite the fact
that Gardiner's war games have
found that war would have
disastrous consequences.
In his report, Gardiner also noted
that Bush's personality and his
sense of his presidential destiny
are adding to the pressures for
war.
"The President is said to see
himself as being like Winston
Churchill, and to believe that the
world will only appreciate him after
he leaves office; he talks about
the Middle East in messianic
terms; he is said to have told
those close to him that he has
got to attack Iran because even
if a Republican succeeds him in
the White House, he will not
have the same freedom of
action that Bush enjoys.
"Most recently, someone
high in the administration told
a reporter that the President
believes that he is the only one
who can 'do the right thing' with
respect to Iran. One thing is clear:
a major source of the pressure for
a military strike emanates from the
very man who will ultimately make
the decision over whether to
authorize such a strike -
the President."
A Made-Up Mind
Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer, who
reflects the thinking of influential
neoconservatives, reached a
similar conclusion - that Bush
had essentially made up his mind
about attacking Iran.
Krauthammer noted that on the
day after the fifth anniversary of
9/11, Bush responded to a
question about Iran by saying: "It's
very important for the American
people to see the President try to
solve problems diplomatically
before resorting to military force."
"'Before' implies that one follows
the other," Krauthammer wrote.
"The signal is unmistakable. An
aerial attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities lies just beyond the
horizon of diplomacy. With the
crisis advancing and the moment
of truth approaching, it is
important to begin looking now
with unflinching honesty at the
military option." [Washington Post,
Sept. 15, 2006]
Yet, before making such a fateful
decision, shouldn't Bush
at least ask his father to finally
level with him and with the
American people about what
happened in 1980 when the
country was transfixed by
Iranian militants holding 52
American hostages
for 444 days?
At Consortiumnews.com, we have
a special interest in that history
because it was my discovery of a
trove of classified documents
pointing to the secret Republican
negotiations with Iran that led to
the founding of this Web site in
1995 and the publication of our
first investigative series.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. news
media was obsessed with issues
such as the O.J. Simpson trial and
the so-called "Clinton scandals,"
so there was little interest in
reexamining some historical
mystery about Republicans going
behind Jimmy Carter's back to
strike a deal with Iran's mullahs.
[The fullest account of this history
can be found in Robert Parry's
Secrecy & Privilege, which was
published in 2004.]
But that history now could be a
matter of life or death for
thousands of people in the Middle
East, including Iranians, Israelis
and American soldiers in Iraq.
False History
The false history surrounding the
Iranian hostage crisis also has led
to the mistaken conclusion that it
was only the specter of Ronald
Reagan's tough-guy image that
made Iran buckle in January 1981
and that, therefore, the Iranians
respect only force.
The hostage release on Reagan's
Inauguration Day bathed the new
President in an aura of heroism as
a leader so feared
by America's enemies that they
scrambled to avoid angering him.
It was viewed as a case study of
how U.S. toughness could restore
the proper international order.
That night, as fireworks lit the
skies of Washington, the
celebration was not only for
a new President and for the freed
hostages, but for a new era in
which American power would no
longer be mocked. That momentum
continues to this day in George
W. Bush's "preemptive" wars
and the imperial boasts about
a "New American Century."
However, the reality of that day 25
years ago now appears to have
been quite different than was
understood at the time. What's
now known about the Iranian
hostage crisis suggests that
the "coincidence" of the Reagan
Inauguration and the Hostage
Release was not a case of
frightened Iranians cowering
before a U.S. President who
might just nuke Tehran.
The evidence indicates that it was
a prearranged deal between the
Republicans and the Iranians. The
Republicans got the hostages and
the political bounce; Iran's Islamic
fundamentalists got a secret
supply of weapons and various
other payoffs.
State Secret
Though the full history remains
a state secret, it now appears
Republicans did contact Iran's
mullahs during the 1980 campaign;
a hostage agreement was reached;
and a clandestine flow of U.S.
weapons soon followed.
In effect, while Americans thought
they were witnessing
one reality - the cinematic heroism
of Ronald Reagan backing down
Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
- another truth existed beneath
the surface, one so troubling
that the Reagan-Bush political
apparatus has made keeping
the secret a top priority for
a quarter century.
The American people must never
be allowed to think that
the Reagan-Bush era began with
collusion between Republican
operatives and Islamic terrorists,
an act that many might view
as treason.
A part of those secret dealings
between Iran and the Republicans
surfaced in the Iran-Contra Affair
in 1986, when the public learned
that the Reagan-Bush
administration had sold arms to
Iran for its help in freeing U.S.
hostages then held in Lebanon.
After first denying these facts, the
White House acknowledged the
existence of the arms deals
in 1985 and 1986 but managed to
block investigators from looking
back before 1984, when the official
histories assert that the Iran
initiative began.
During the 1987 congressional
hearings on Iran-Contra,
Republicans - behind the
hardnosed leadership of Rep. Dick
Cheney - fought to protect the
White House, while Democrats, led
by the accommodating Rep. Lee
Hamilton, had no stomach for a
constitutional crisis.
The result was a truncated
investigation that laid much of
the blame on supposedly rogue
operatives, such as Marine
Lt. Col. Oliver North.
Many American editors quickly
grew bored with the complex Iran-
Contra tale, but a few reporters
kept searching for its origins.
The trail kept receding in time,
back to the Republican-Iranian
relationship forged in the heat
of the 1980 presidential campaign.
"Germs" of Scandal
Besides the few journalists, some
U.S. government officials reached
the same conclusion.
For instance, Nicholas Veliotes,
Reagan's assistant secretary of
state for the Middle East, traced
the "germs" of the Iran-Contra
scandal to the 1980 campaign.
In a PBS interview, Veliotes said
he first discovered the secret
arms pipeline to Iran when an
Israeli weapons flight was shot
down over the Soviet Union on
July 18, 1981, after straying off
course on its third mission to
deliver U.S. military supplies from
Israel to Iran via Larnaca, Cyprus.
"We received a press report from
Tass [the official Soviet news
agency] that an Argentinian plane
had crashed," Veliotes said.
"According to the documents …
this was chartered by Israel and it
was carrying American military
equipment to Iran. …And it was
clear to me after my conversations
with people on high that indeed
we had agreed that the Israelis
could transship to Iran some
American-origin military equipment.
"Now this was not a covert
operation in the classic sense,
for which probably you could get a
legal justification for it. As it stood,
I believe it was the initiative of a
few people [who] gave the Israelis
the go-ahead. The net result was
a violation of American law."
The reason that the Israeli flights
violated U.S. law was that no
formal notification had been given
to Congress about the
transshipment of U.S. military
equipment as required by the
Arms Export Control Act - a
foreshadowing of George W.
Bush's decision two decades later
to bypass the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
In checking out the Israeli flight,
Veliotes came to believe that the
Reagan-Bush camp's dealings with
Iran dated back to before the 1980
election.
"It seems to have started in
earnest in the period probably
prior to the election of 1980, as the
Israelis had identified who would
become the new players in the
national security area in the
Reagan administration," Veliotes
said. "And I understand some
contacts were made at that time."
Q: "Between?"
Veliotes: "Between Israelis and
these new players."
Israeli Interests
In my work on the Iran-Contra
scandal, I had obtained a classified
summary of testimony from a mid-
level State Department official,
David Satterfield, who saw the
early arms shipments as a
continuation of Israeli policy
toward Iran.
"Satterfield believed that Israel
maintained a persistent military
relationship with Iran, based on
the Israeli assumption that Iran
was a non-Arab state which always
constituted a potential ally in the
Middle East," the summary read.
"There was evidence that Israel
resumed providing arms to Iran in
1980."
Over the years, senior Israeli
officials claimed that those early
shipments had the discreet
blessing of top Reagan-Bush
officials.
In May 1982, Israeli Defense
Minister Ariel Sharon told the
Washington Post that U.S. officials
had approved the Iranian arms
transfers. "We said that
notwithstanding the tyranny of
Khomeini, which we all hate, we
have to leave a small window open
to this country, a tiny small bridge
to this country," Sharon said.
A decade later, in 1993, I took part
in an interview with former Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in
Tel Aviv during which
he said he had read Gary Sick's
1991 book, October Surprise,
which made the case for believing
that the Republicans had
intervened in the 1980 hostage
negotiations to disrupt Jimmy
Carter's reelection.
With the topic raised, one
interviewer asked, "What do you
think? Was there an October
Surprise?"
"Of course, it was," Shamir
responded without hesitation. "It
was." Later in the interview when
pressed for details, Shamir
seemed to regret his candor and
tried to backpedal somewhat on
his answer.
Lie Detector
Iran-Contra special prosecutor
Lawrence Walsh also came to
suspect that the arms-for-hostage
trail led back to 1980, since it was
the only way to make sense of why
the Reagan-Bush team continued
selling arms to Iran in 1985-86
when there was so little progress
in reducing the number of
American hostages in Lebanon.
When Walsh's investigators
conducted a polygraph of George
H.W. Bush's national security
adviser Donald Gregg, they added
a question about Gregg's possible
participation in the secret 1980
negotiations.
"Were you ever involved in a plan
to delay the release of the
hostages in Iran until after the
1980 Presidential election?" the
examiner asked. Gregg's denial
was judged to be deceptive.
[See Final Report of the
Independent Counsel for
Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]
While investigating the so-called
"October Surprise" issue for PBS
"Frontline" in 1991-92, I also
discovered a former State
Department official who claimed
contemporaneous knowledge of
an October 1980 trip by then vice
presidential candidate George H.
W. Bush to Paris to meet with
Iranians about the hostages.
David Henderson, who was
then a State Department Foreign
Service officer, recalled the date
as October 18, 1980. He said he
heard about the Paris trip when
Chicago Tribune correspondent
John Maclean met him for an
interview on another topic.
Maclean, son of author Norman
Maclean who wrote A River Runs
Through It, had just been told by
a well-placed Republican source
that Bush was flying to Paris for
a clandestine meeting with a
delegation of Iranians about
the American hostages.
Henderson wasn't sure whether
Maclean was looking for some
confirmation or whether he was
simply sharing an interesting tidbit
of news. For his part, Maclean
never wrote about the leak
because, he told me later,
a GOP campaign spokesman
had denied it.
Faded Memory
As the years passed, the memory
of that Bush-to-Paris leak faded for
both Henderson and Maclean, until
October Surprise allegations
bubbled to the surface in the early
1990s.
Several intelligence operatives
were claiming that Bush had
undertaken a secret mission to
Paris in mid-October 1980 to give
the Iranian government an
assurance from one of the two
Republicans on the presidential
ticket that the GOP promises of
future military and other
assistance would be kept.
Henderson mentioned his
recollection of the Bush-to-Paris
leak in a 1991 letter to a U.S.
senator, which someone sent to
me. Though Henderson didn't
remember the name of the
Chicago Tribune reporter, we were
able to track it back to Maclean
through a story that he had written
about Henderson.
Though not eager to become part
of the October Surprise story in
1991, Maclean confirmed that he
had received the Republican leak.
He also agreed with Henderson's
recollection that their
conversation occurred on or about
Oct.18, 1980. But Maclean still
declined to identify his source.
The significance of the Maclean-
Henderson conversation was that
it was a piece of information
locked in a kind of historical
amber, untainted by subsequent
claims from intelligence
operatives whose credibility had
been challenged.
One couldn't accuse Maclean of
concocting the Bush-to-Paris
allegation for some ulterior
motive, since he hadn't used it in
1980, nor had he volunteered it a
decade later. He only confirmed it
when asked and even then wasn't
eager to talk about it.
Bush Meeting
The Maclean-Henderson
conversation provided important
corroboration for the claims by the
intelligence operatives, including
Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-
Menashe who said he saw Bush
attend a final round of meetings
with Iranians in Paris.
Ben-Menashe said he was in Paris
as part of a six-member Israeli
delegation that was coordinating
the arms deliveries to Iran. He said
the key meeting had occurred at
the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
In his memoirs, Profits of War, Ben-
Menashe said he recognized
several Americans, including
Republican congressional aide
Robert McFarlane and CIA officers
Robert Gates, Donald Gregg and
George Cave. Then, Ben-Menashe
said, Iranian cleric Mehdi Karrubi
arrived and walked into a
conference room.
"A few minutes later George Bush,
with the wispy-haired William
Casey in front of him, stepped out
of the elevator. He smiled, said
hello to everyone, and, like
Karrubi, hurried into the
conference room," Ben-Menashe
wrote.
Ben-Menashe said the Paris
meetings served to finalize a
previously outlined agreement
calling for release of the 52
hostages in exchange for $52
million, guarantees of arms sales
for Iran, and unfreezing of Iranian
monies in U.S. banks. The timing,
however, was changed, he said, to
coincide with Reagan's expected
Inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.
Ben-Menashe, who repeated his
allegations under oath in a
congressional deposition,
received support from several
sources, including pilot Heinrich
Rupp, who said he flew Casey -
then Reagan's campaign director -
from Washington's National Airport
to Paris on a flight that left very
late on a rainy night in mid-October.
Rupp said that after arriving at
LeBourget airport outside Paris,
he saw a man resembling Bush on
the tarmac. The night of Oct. 18
indeed was rainy in the
Washington area. Also, sign-in
sheets at the Reagan-Bush
headquarters in Arlington, Virginia,
placed Casey within a five-minute
drive of National Airport late that
evening.
Other Witnesses
There were other bits and pieces
of corroboration about the Paris
meetings. As early as 1987, Iran's
ex-President Bani-Sadr had made
similar claims about a Paris
meeting between Republicans and
Iranians. A French arms dealer,
Nicholas Ignatiew, told me in 1990
that he had checked with his
government contacts and was told
that Republicans did meet with
Iranians in Paris in mid-October
1980.
A well-connected French
investigative reporter Claude
Angeli said his sources inside the
French secret service confirmed
that the service provided "cover"
for a meeting between
Republicans and Iranians in
France on the weekend of Oct. 18-
19, 1980. German journalist Martin
Kilian had received a similar
account from a top aide to the
fiercely anti-communist chief of
French intelligence, Alexandre
deMarenches.
Later, deMarenches's biographer,
David Andelman, told
congressional investigators under
oath that deMarenches admitted
that he had helped the Reagan-
Bush campaign arrange meetings
with Iranians about the hostage
issue in the summer and fall of
1980, with one meeting held in
Paris in October.
Andelman said deMarenches
ordered that the secret meetings
be kept out of his biography
because the story could otherwise
damage the reputation of his
friends, Casey and Bush. "I don't
want to hurt my friend, George
Bush," Andelman recalled
deMarenches saying as Bush was
seeking re-election in 1992.
Gates, McFarlane, Gregg and Cave
all denied participating in the
meeting, though some alibis
proved shaky and others were
never examined at all.
Lashing Out
For his part, George H.W. Bush
lashed out at the October Surprise
allegations. At a news conference
on June 4, 1992, Bush was asked if
he thought an independent
counsel was needed to investigate
allegations of secret arms
shipments to Iraq during the 1980s.
"I wonder whether they're going to
use the same prosecutors that are
trying out there to see whether I
was in Paris in 1980," Bush
snapped.
As a surprised hush fell over the
press corps, Bush continued, "I
mean, where are we going with the
taxpayers' money in this political
year?" Bush then asserted, "I was
not in Paris, and we did nothing
illegal or wrong here" on Iraq.
Though Bush was a former CIA
director and had been caught lying
about Iran-Contra with his claims
of being "out of the loop," he was
still given the benefit of the doubt
in 1992. Plus, he had what
appeared to be a solid alibi for Oct.
18-19, 1980, Secret Service
records which placed him at his
home in Washington on that
weekend.
However, the Bush administration
released the records only in
redacted form, making it difficult
for congressional investigators to
verify exactly what Bush had done
that day and whom he had met.
The records for the key day of
Sunday, Oct. 19, purported to show
Bush going to the Chevy Chase
Country Club in the morning and to
someone's private residence in
the afternoon. If Bush indeed had
been on those side trips, it would
close the window on any possible
flight to Paris and back.
Investigators of the October
Surprise mystery - including those
of us at "Frontline" - put great
weight on the Secret Service
records. But little is really known
about the Secret Service's
standards for recording the
movements of protectees.
Since the cooperation of the
protectees is essential to the
Secret Service staying in position
to thwart any attacker, the agents
presumably must show flexibility in
what details they report.
Few politicians are going to want
bodyguards around if they write
down the details of sensitive
meetings or assignations with
illicit lovers. Reasonably, the
agents might have to fudge or
leave out some of the facts.
Bush's Alibi
As it turned out, only one Secret
Service agent on the Bush detail -
supervisor Leonard Tanis -
claimed a clear recollection of the
trip to the Chevy Chase Country
Club that Sunday. Tanis told
congressional investigators that
Mr. and Mrs. Bush went to the
Chevy Chase club for brunch with
Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart.
But at "Frontline," we had already
gone down that path and found it
to be a dead end. We had obtained
Mrs. Bush's protective records
and they showed her going to the
C&O Canal jogging path in
Washington, not to the Chevy
Chase club.
We also had reached Justice
Stewart's widow, who had no
recollection of any Chevy Chase
brunch. So it appeared that Tanis
was wrong - and he later backed
off his claims.
The inaccurate Tanis account
raised the suspicions of House
International Affairs Committee
counsel Spencer Oliver. In a six-
page memo urging a closer look at
the Bush question, Oliver argued
that the Secret Service had
withheld the uncensored daily
report for no justifiable reason
from Congress.
"Why did the Secret Service
refuse to cooperate on a matter
which could have conclusively
cleared George Bush of these
serious allegations?" Oliver
asked. "Was the White House
involved in this refusal? Did they
order it?"
Oliver also noted Bush's strange
behavior in raising the October
Surprise issue on his own at two
news conferences.
"It can be fairly said that President
Bush's recent outbursts about the
October Surprise inquiries and
[about] his whereabouts in mid-
October of 1980 are disingenuous
at best," wrote Oliver, "since the
administration has refused to
make available the documents and
the witnesses that could finally
and conclusively clear Mr. Bush."
Secret Flight
Unintentionally, Bush's eldest son
poked another hole in the
assumption that the government
would never doctor official
records to help cover up
international travel by a
protected public figure.
For Thanksgiving 2003, George W.
Bush wanted to make a surprise
flight to Iraq. To give Bush's flight
additional security - and extra
drama - phony flight plans were
filed, a false call sign was
employed, and Air Force One was
identified as a "Gulfstream 5" in
response to a question from a
British Airways pilot.
"A senior administration official
told reporters that even some
members of Bush's Secret Service
detail believed he was still in
Crawford, Texas, getting ready
to have his parents over for
Thanksgiving," Washington Post
reporter Mike Allen wrote.
[Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2003]
Besides falsely telling reporters
that George W. Bush planned to
spend Thanksgiving at his Texas
ranch, Bush's handlers spirited
Bush to Air Force One in an
unmarked vehicle, with only a
tiny Secret Service contingent,
the Post reported.
Bush later relished describing the
scene to reporters.
"They pulled up in a plain-looking
vehicle with tinted windows.
I slipped on a baseball cap, pulled
'er down - as did Condi. We looked
like a normal couple," he said,
referring to national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Though the melodramatic
deception surrounding Bush's
flight to Baghdad soon became
public - since it was in essence a
publicity stunt - it did prove the
ability of high-ranking officials to
conduct their movements in
secrecy and the readiness of
security personnel to file false
reports as part of these operations.
Collapsing Alibis
By the late 1990s, other elements
of the Republicans' October
Surprise alibis were collapsing,
including pro-Reagan-Bush claims
cited prominently by some news
organizations, such as the New
Republic and Newsweek. [For
more details, see Parry's Secrecy &
Privilege or Consortiumnews.
com's "The Bushes & the Death of
Reason."]
With the Republican defenses
falling apart and with many
documents from the Reagan-Bush
years scheduled for release in
2001, the opportunity to finally
learn the truth about the pivotal
election of 1980 loomed.
But George W. Bush got into the
White House via a ruling by five
Republicans on the U.S. Supreme
Court to stop the counting of
votes in Florida. Then, on his first
day in office, his counsel Alberto
Gonzales drafted an executive
order for Bush that postponed
release of the Reagan-Bush
records.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks, Bush approved another
secrecy order that put the records
beyond the public's reach
indefinitely, passing down control
of many documents to a
President's or a Vice President's
descendants.
Thus, the truth about how the
Reagan-Bush era began in the
1980s - and what was done to
contain the Iran-Contra
investigations in the late 1980s
and early 1990s - might eventually
become the property of the noted
scholars, the Bush twins, Jenna
and Barbara.
The American people will be kept
in the dark about their own history,
like the subjects of some
hereditary dynasty. Without the
facts, they also face the possibility
of being more easily manipulated
by emotional appeals devoid of
informed debate
That moment has come sooner
than many expected. The United
States appears to be on the brink
of a war with Iran, while many
government officials and the
citizenry are operating on
historical assumptions derived
more from fiction than fact.
--------
Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and
Newsweek. His latest book,
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the
Bush Dynasty from Watergate
to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com.
It's also available at Amazon.com,
as is his 1999 book, Lost History:
Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
"Project Truth."
and the Truth
About Iran
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Thursday 21 September 2006
Having gone through the
diplomatic motions with Iran,
George W. Bush is shifting
toward a military option that
carries severe risks for American
soldiers in Iraq as well as for long-
term U.S. interests around the
world. Yet, despite this looming
crisis, the Bush Family continues
to withhold key historical facts
about U.S.-Iranian relations.
Those historical facts - relating to
Republican contacts with Iran's
Islamic regime more than a quarter
century ago - are relevant today
because an underlying theme in
Bush's rationale for war is that
direct negotiations with Iran are
pointless. But Bush's own father
may know otherwise.
The evidence is now persuasive
that George H.W. Bush
participated in negotiations with
Iran's radical regime in 1980,
behind President Jimmy Carter's
back, with the goal of arranging
for 52 American hostages to be
released after Bush and Ronald
Reagan were sworn in as Vice
President and President,
respectively.
In exchange, the Republicans
agreed to let Iran obtain U.S.-
manufactured military supplies
through Israel. The Iranians kept
their word, releasing the hostages
immediately upon Reagan's
swearing-in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the next few years, the
Republican-Israel-Iran weapons
pipeline operated mostly in secret,
only exploding into public view
with the Iran-Contra scandal in late
1986. Even then, the Reagan-Bush
team was able to limit
congressional and other
investigations, keeping the full
history - and the 1980 chapter -
hidden from the American people.
Upon taking office on Jan. 20,
2001, George W. Bush walled up
the history even more by issuing
an executive order blocking the
scheduled declassification of
records from the Reagan-Bush
years. After 9/11, the younger
George Bush added more bricks to
the wall by giving Presidents, Vice
Presidents and their heirs power
over releasing documents.
Impending War
But that history is vital today.
First, the American people should
know the real history of
U.S.-Iran relations before the Bush
administration launches another
preemptive war in the Middle East.
Second, the degree to which
Iranian officials are willing to
negotiate with their U.S.
counterparts - and fulfill their
side of the bargain - bears on
the feasibility of talks now.
Indeed, the only rationale for
hiding the historical record is
that it would embarrass the Bush
Family and possibly complicate
George W. Bush's decision to
attack Iran regardless of what
the American people might want.
The Time magazine cover story,
released on Sept. 17, and a new
report by retired Air Force Col.
Sam Gardiner - entitled "The End
of the 'Summer Diplomacy'" - make
clear that the military option
against Iran is moving rapidly
toward implementation.
Gardiner, who taught at the
National War College and has war-
gamed U.S. attacks on Iran for
American policymakers over the
past five years, noted that one of
the "seven key truths" guiding
Bush to war is that "you cannot
negotiate with these people."
That "truth," combined with
suspicions about Iran's nuclear
ambitions and Tehran's
relationship with Hezbelloh and
other militant Islamic groups, has
led the Bush administration into
the box-canyon logic that war is
the only answer, despite the fact
that Gardiner's war games have
found that war would have
disastrous consequences.
In his report, Gardiner also noted
that Bush's personality and his
sense of his presidential destiny
are adding to the pressures for
war.
"The President is said to see
himself as being like Winston
Churchill, and to believe that the
world will only appreciate him after
he leaves office; he talks about
the Middle East in messianic
terms; he is said to have told
those close to him that he has
got to attack Iran because even
if a Republican succeeds him in
the White House, he will not
have the same freedom of
action that Bush enjoys.
"Most recently, someone
high in the administration told
a reporter that the President
believes that he is the only one
who can 'do the right thing' with
respect to Iran. One thing is clear:
a major source of the pressure for
a military strike emanates from the
very man who will ultimately make
the decision over whether to
authorize such a strike -
the President."
A Made-Up Mind
Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer, who
reflects the thinking of influential
neoconservatives, reached a
similar conclusion - that Bush
had essentially made up his mind
about attacking Iran.
Krauthammer noted that on the
day after the fifth anniversary of
9/11, Bush responded to a
question about Iran by saying: "It's
very important for the American
people to see the President try to
solve problems diplomatically
before resorting to military force."
"'Before' implies that one follows
the other," Krauthammer wrote.
"The signal is unmistakable. An
aerial attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities lies just beyond the
horizon of diplomacy. With the
crisis advancing and the moment
of truth approaching, it is
important to begin looking now
with unflinching honesty at the
military option." [Washington Post,
Sept. 15, 2006]
Yet, before making such a fateful
decision, shouldn't Bush
at least ask his father to finally
level with him and with the
American people about what
happened in 1980 when the
country was transfixed by
Iranian militants holding 52
American hostages
for 444 days?
At Consortiumnews.com, we have
a special interest in that history
because it was my discovery of a
trove of classified documents
pointing to the secret Republican
negotiations with Iran that led to
the founding of this Web site in
1995 and the publication of our
first investigative series.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. news
media was obsessed with issues
such as the O.J. Simpson trial and
the so-called "Clinton scandals,"
so there was little interest in
reexamining some historical
mystery about Republicans going
behind Jimmy Carter's back to
strike a deal with Iran's mullahs.
[The fullest account of this history
can be found in Robert Parry's
Secrecy & Privilege, which was
published in 2004.]
But that history now could be a
matter of life or death for
thousands of people in the Middle
East, including Iranians, Israelis
and American soldiers in Iraq.
False History
The false history surrounding the
Iranian hostage crisis also has led
to the mistaken conclusion that it
was only the specter of Ronald
Reagan's tough-guy image that
made Iran buckle in January 1981
and that, therefore, the Iranians
respect only force.
The hostage release on Reagan's
Inauguration Day bathed the new
President in an aura of heroism as
a leader so feared
by America's enemies that they
scrambled to avoid angering him.
It was viewed as a case study of
how U.S. toughness could restore
the proper international order.
That night, as fireworks lit the
skies of Washington, the
celebration was not only for
a new President and for the freed
hostages, but for a new era in
which American power would no
longer be mocked. That momentum
continues to this day in George
W. Bush's "preemptive" wars
and the imperial boasts about
a "New American Century."
However, the reality of that day 25
years ago now appears to have
been quite different than was
understood at the time. What's
now known about the Iranian
hostage crisis suggests that
the "coincidence" of the Reagan
Inauguration and the Hostage
Release was not a case of
frightened Iranians cowering
before a U.S. President who
might just nuke Tehran.
The evidence indicates that it was
a prearranged deal between the
Republicans and the Iranians. The
Republicans got the hostages and
the political bounce; Iran's Islamic
fundamentalists got a secret
supply of weapons and various
other payoffs.
State Secret
Though the full history remains
a state secret, it now appears
Republicans did contact Iran's
mullahs during the 1980 campaign;
a hostage agreement was reached;
and a clandestine flow of U.S.
weapons soon followed.
In effect, while Americans thought
they were witnessing
one reality - the cinematic heroism
of Ronald Reagan backing down
Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
- another truth existed beneath
the surface, one so troubling
that the Reagan-Bush political
apparatus has made keeping
the secret a top priority for
a quarter century.
The American people must never
be allowed to think that
the Reagan-Bush era began with
collusion between Republican
operatives and Islamic terrorists,
an act that many might view
as treason.
A part of those secret dealings
between Iran and the Republicans
surfaced in the Iran-Contra Affair
in 1986, when the public learned
that the Reagan-Bush
administration had sold arms to
Iran for its help in freeing U.S.
hostages then held in Lebanon.
After first denying these facts, the
White House acknowledged the
existence of the arms deals
in 1985 and 1986 but managed to
block investigators from looking
back before 1984, when the official
histories assert that the Iran
initiative began.
During the 1987 congressional
hearings on Iran-Contra,
Republicans - behind the
hardnosed leadership of Rep. Dick
Cheney - fought to protect the
White House, while Democrats, led
by the accommodating Rep. Lee
Hamilton, had no stomach for a
constitutional crisis.
The result was a truncated
investigation that laid much of
the blame on supposedly rogue
operatives, such as Marine
Lt. Col. Oliver North.
Many American editors quickly
grew bored with the complex Iran-
Contra tale, but a few reporters
kept searching for its origins.
The trail kept receding in time,
back to the Republican-Iranian
relationship forged in the heat
of the 1980 presidential campaign.
"Germs" of Scandal
Besides the few journalists, some
U.S. government officials reached
the same conclusion.
For instance, Nicholas Veliotes,
Reagan's assistant secretary of
state for the Middle East, traced
the "germs" of the Iran-Contra
scandal to the 1980 campaign.
In a PBS interview, Veliotes said
he first discovered the secret
arms pipeline to Iran when an
Israeli weapons flight was shot
down over the Soviet Union on
July 18, 1981, after straying off
course on its third mission to
deliver U.S. military supplies from
Israel to Iran via Larnaca, Cyprus.
"We received a press report from
Tass [the official Soviet news
agency] that an Argentinian plane
had crashed," Veliotes said.
"According to the documents …
this was chartered by Israel and it
was carrying American military
equipment to Iran. …And it was
clear to me after my conversations
with people on high that indeed
we had agreed that the Israelis
could transship to Iran some
American-origin military equipment.
"Now this was not a covert
operation in the classic sense,
for which probably you could get a
legal justification for it. As it stood,
I believe it was the initiative of a
few people [who] gave the Israelis
the go-ahead. The net result was
a violation of American law."
The reason that the Israeli flights
violated U.S. law was that no
formal notification had been given
to Congress about the
transshipment of U.S. military
equipment as required by the
Arms Export Control Act - a
foreshadowing of George W.
Bush's decision two decades later
to bypass the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
In checking out the Israeli flight,
Veliotes came to believe that the
Reagan-Bush camp's dealings with
Iran dated back to before the 1980
election.
"It seems to have started in
earnest in the period probably
prior to the election of 1980, as the
Israelis had identified who would
become the new players in the
national security area in the
Reagan administration," Veliotes
said. "And I understand some
contacts were made at that time."
Q: "Between?"
Veliotes: "Between Israelis and
these new players."
Israeli Interests
In my work on the Iran-Contra
scandal, I had obtained a classified
summary of testimony from a mid-
level State Department official,
David Satterfield, who saw the
early arms shipments as a
continuation of Israeli policy
toward Iran.
"Satterfield believed that Israel
maintained a persistent military
relationship with Iran, based on
the Israeli assumption that Iran
was a non-Arab state which always
constituted a potential ally in the
Middle East," the summary read.
"There was evidence that Israel
resumed providing arms to Iran in
1980."
Over the years, senior Israeli
officials claimed that those early
shipments had the discreet
blessing of top Reagan-Bush
officials.
In May 1982, Israeli Defense
Minister Ariel Sharon told the
Washington Post that U.S. officials
had approved the Iranian arms
transfers. "We said that
notwithstanding the tyranny of
Khomeini, which we all hate, we
have to leave a small window open
to this country, a tiny small bridge
to this country," Sharon said.
A decade later, in 1993, I took part
in an interview with former Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in
Tel Aviv during which
he said he had read Gary Sick's
1991 book, October Surprise,
which made the case for believing
that the Republicans had
intervened in the 1980 hostage
negotiations to disrupt Jimmy
Carter's reelection.
With the topic raised, one
interviewer asked, "What do you
think? Was there an October
Surprise?"
"Of course, it was," Shamir
responded without hesitation. "It
was." Later in the interview when
pressed for details, Shamir
seemed to regret his candor and
tried to backpedal somewhat on
his answer.
Lie Detector
Iran-Contra special prosecutor
Lawrence Walsh also came to
suspect that the arms-for-hostage
trail led back to 1980, since it was
the only way to make sense of why
the Reagan-Bush team continued
selling arms to Iran in 1985-86
when there was so little progress
in reducing the number of
American hostages in Lebanon.
When Walsh's investigators
conducted a polygraph of George
H.W. Bush's national security
adviser Donald Gregg, they added
a question about Gregg's possible
participation in the secret 1980
negotiations.
"Were you ever involved in a plan
to delay the release of the
hostages in Iran until after the
1980 Presidential election?" the
examiner asked. Gregg's denial
was judged to be deceptive.
[See Final Report of the
Independent Counsel for
Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]
While investigating the so-called
"October Surprise" issue for PBS
"Frontline" in 1991-92, I also
discovered a former State
Department official who claimed
contemporaneous knowledge of
an October 1980 trip by then vice
presidential candidate George H.
W. Bush to Paris to meet with
Iranians about the hostages.
David Henderson, who was
then a State Department Foreign
Service officer, recalled the date
as October 18, 1980. He said he
heard about the Paris trip when
Chicago Tribune correspondent
John Maclean met him for an
interview on another topic.
Maclean, son of author Norman
Maclean who wrote A River Runs
Through It, had just been told by
a well-placed Republican source
that Bush was flying to Paris for
a clandestine meeting with a
delegation of Iranians about
the American hostages.
Henderson wasn't sure whether
Maclean was looking for some
confirmation or whether he was
simply sharing an interesting tidbit
of news. For his part, Maclean
never wrote about the leak
because, he told me later,
a GOP campaign spokesman
had denied it.
Faded Memory
As the years passed, the memory
of that Bush-to-Paris leak faded for
both Henderson and Maclean, until
October Surprise allegations
bubbled to the surface in the early
1990s.
Several intelligence operatives
were claiming that Bush had
undertaken a secret mission to
Paris in mid-October 1980 to give
the Iranian government an
assurance from one of the two
Republicans on the presidential
ticket that the GOP promises of
future military and other
assistance would be kept.
Henderson mentioned his
recollection of the Bush-to-Paris
leak in a 1991 letter to a U.S.
senator, which someone sent to
me. Though Henderson didn't
remember the name of the
Chicago Tribune reporter, we were
able to track it back to Maclean
through a story that he had written
about Henderson.
Though not eager to become part
of the October Surprise story in
1991, Maclean confirmed that he
had received the Republican leak.
He also agreed with Henderson's
recollection that their
conversation occurred on or about
Oct.18, 1980. But Maclean still
declined to identify his source.
The significance of the Maclean-
Henderson conversation was that
it was a piece of information
locked in a kind of historical
amber, untainted by subsequent
claims from intelligence
operatives whose credibility had
been challenged.
One couldn't accuse Maclean of
concocting the Bush-to-Paris
allegation for some ulterior
motive, since he hadn't used it in
1980, nor had he volunteered it a
decade later. He only confirmed it
when asked and even then wasn't
eager to talk about it.
Bush Meeting
The Maclean-Henderson
conversation provided important
corroboration for the claims by the
intelligence operatives, including
Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-
Menashe who said he saw Bush
attend a final round of meetings
with Iranians in Paris.
Ben-Menashe said he was in Paris
as part of a six-member Israeli
delegation that was coordinating
the arms deliveries to Iran. He said
the key meeting had occurred at
the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
In his memoirs, Profits of War, Ben-
Menashe said he recognized
several Americans, including
Republican congressional aide
Robert McFarlane and CIA officers
Robert Gates, Donald Gregg and
George Cave. Then, Ben-Menashe
said, Iranian cleric Mehdi Karrubi
arrived and walked into a
conference room.
"A few minutes later George Bush,
with the wispy-haired William
Casey in front of him, stepped out
of the elevator. He smiled, said
hello to everyone, and, like
Karrubi, hurried into the
conference room," Ben-Menashe
wrote.
Ben-Menashe said the Paris
meetings served to finalize a
previously outlined agreement
calling for release of the 52
hostages in exchange for $52
million, guarantees of arms sales
for Iran, and unfreezing of Iranian
monies in U.S. banks. The timing,
however, was changed, he said, to
coincide with Reagan's expected
Inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.
Ben-Menashe, who repeated his
allegations under oath in a
congressional deposition,
received support from several
sources, including pilot Heinrich
Rupp, who said he flew Casey -
then Reagan's campaign director -
from Washington's National Airport
to Paris on a flight that left very
late on a rainy night in mid-October.
Rupp said that after arriving at
LeBourget airport outside Paris,
he saw a man resembling Bush on
the tarmac. The night of Oct. 18
indeed was rainy in the
Washington area. Also, sign-in
sheets at the Reagan-Bush
headquarters in Arlington, Virginia,
placed Casey within a five-minute
drive of National Airport late that
evening.
Other Witnesses
There were other bits and pieces
of corroboration about the Paris
meetings. As early as 1987, Iran's
ex-President Bani-Sadr had made
similar claims about a Paris
meeting between Republicans and
Iranians. A French arms dealer,
Nicholas Ignatiew, told me in 1990
that he had checked with his
government contacts and was told
that Republicans did meet with
Iranians in Paris in mid-October
1980.
A well-connected French
investigative reporter Claude
Angeli said his sources inside the
French secret service confirmed
that the service provided "cover"
for a meeting between
Republicans and Iranians in
France on the weekend of Oct. 18-
19, 1980. German journalist Martin
Kilian had received a similar
account from a top aide to the
fiercely anti-communist chief of
French intelligence, Alexandre
deMarenches.
Later, deMarenches's biographer,
David Andelman, told
congressional investigators under
oath that deMarenches admitted
that he had helped the Reagan-
Bush campaign arrange meetings
with Iranians about the hostage
issue in the summer and fall of
1980, with one meeting held in
Paris in October.
Andelman said deMarenches
ordered that the secret meetings
be kept out of his biography
because the story could otherwise
damage the reputation of his
friends, Casey and Bush. "I don't
want to hurt my friend, George
Bush," Andelman recalled
deMarenches saying as Bush was
seeking re-election in 1992.
Gates, McFarlane, Gregg and Cave
all denied participating in the
meeting, though some alibis
proved shaky and others were
never examined at all.
Lashing Out
For his part, George H.W. Bush
lashed out at the October Surprise
allegations. At a news conference
on June 4, 1992, Bush was asked if
he thought an independent
counsel was needed to investigate
allegations of secret arms
shipments to Iraq during the 1980s.
"I wonder whether they're going to
use the same prosecutors that are
trying out there to see whether I
was in Paris in 1980," Bush
snapped.
As a surprised hush fell over the
press corps, Bush continued, "I
mean, where are we going with the
taxpayers' money in this political
year?" Bush then asserted, "I was
not in Paris, and we did nothing
illegal or wrong here" on Iraq.
Though Bush was a former CIA
director and had been caught lying
about Iran-Contra with his claims
of being "out of the loop," he was
still given the benefit of the doubt
in 1992. Plus, he had what
appeared to be a solid alibi for Oct.
18-19, 1980, Secret Service
records which placed him at his
home in Washington on that
weekend.
However, the Bush administration
released the records only in
redacted form, making it difficult
for congressional investigators to
verify exactly what Bush had done
that day and whom he had met.
The records for the key day of
Sunday, Oct. 19, purported to show
Bush going to the Chevy Chase
Country Club in the morning and to
someone's private residence in
the afternoon. If Bush indeed had
been on those side trips, it would
close the window on any possible
flight to Paris and back.
Investigators of the October
Surprise mystery - including those
of us at "Frontline" - put great
weight on the Secret Service
records. But little is really known
about the Secret Service's
standards for recording the
movements of protectees.
Since the cooperation of the
protectees is essential to the
Secret Service staying in position
to thwart any attacker, the agents
presumably must show flexibility in
what details they report.
Few politicians are going to want
bodyguards around if they write
down the details of sensitive
meetings or assignations with
illicit lovers. Reasonably, the
agents might have to fudge or
leave out some of the facts.
Bush's Alibi
As it turned out, only one Secret
Service agent on the Bush detail -
supervisor Leonard Tanis -
claimed a clear recollection of the
trip to the Chevy Chase Country
Club that Sunday. Tanis told
congressional investigators that
Mr. and Mrs. Bush went to the
Chevy Chase club for brunch with
Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart.
But at "Frontline," we had already
gone down that path and found it
to be a dead end. We had obtained
Mrs. Bush's protective records
and they showed her going to the
C&O Canal jogging path in
Washington, not to the Chevy
Chase club.
We also had reached Justice
Stewart's widow, who had no
recollection of any Chevy Chase
brunch. So it appeared that Tanis
was wrong - and he later backed
off his claims.
The inaccurate Tanis account
raised the suspicions of House
International Affairs Committee
counsel Spencer Oliver. In a six-
page memo urging a closer look at
the Bush question, Oliver argued
that the Secret Service had
withheld the uncensored daily
report for no justifiable reason
from Congress.
"Why did the Secret Service
refuse to cooperate on a matter
which could have conclusively
cleared George Bush of these
serious allegations?" Oliver
asked. "Was the White House
involved in this refusal? Did they
order it?"
Oliver also noted Bush's strange
behavior in raising the October
Surprise issue on his own at two
news conferences.
"It can be fairly said that President
Bush's recent outbursts about the
October Surprise inquiries and
[about] his whereabouts in mid-
October of 1980 are disingenuous
at best," wrote Oliver, "since the
administration has refused to
make available the documents and
the witnesses that could finally
and conclusively clear Mr. Bush."
Secret Flight
Unintentionally, Bush's eldest son
poked another hole in the
assumption that the government
would never doctor official
records to help cover up
international travel by a
protected public figure.
For Thanksgiving 2003, George W.
Bush wanted to make a surprise
flight to Iraq. To give Bush's flight
additional security - and extra
drama - phony flight plans were
filed, a false call sign was
employed, and Air Force One was
identified as a "Gulfstream 5" in
response to a question from a
British Airways pilot.
"A senior administration official
told reporters that even some
members of Bush's Secret Service
detail believed he was still in
Crawford, Texas, getting ready
to have his parents over for
Thanksgiving," Washington Post
reporter Mike Allen wrote.
[Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2003]
Besides falsely telling reporters
that George W. Bush planned to
spend Thanksgiving at his Texas
ranch, Bush's handlers spirited
Bush to Air Force One in an
unmarked vehicle, with only a
tiny Secret Service contingent,
the Post reported.
Bush later relished describing the
scene to reporters.
"They pulled up in a plain-looking
vehicle with tinted windows.
I slipped on a baseball cap, pulled
'er down - as did Condi. We looked
like a normal couple," he said,
referring to national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Though the melodramatic
deception surrounding Bush's
flight to Baghdad soon became
public - since it was in essence a
publicity stunt - it did prove the
ability of high-ranking officials to
conduct their movements in
secrecy and the readiness of
security personnel to file false
reports as part of these operations.
Collapsing Alibis
By the late 1990s, other elements
of the Republicans' October
Surprise alibis were collapsing,
including pro-Reagan-Bush claims
cited prominently by some news
organizations, such as the New
Republic and Newsweek. [For
more details, see Parry's Secrecy &
Privilege or Consortiumnews.
com's "The Bushes & the Death of
Reason."]
With the Republican defenses
falling apart and with many
documents from the Reagan-Bush
years scheduled for release in
2001, the opportunity to finally
learn the truth about the pivotal
election of 1980 loomed.
But George W. Bush got into the
White House via a ruling by five
Republicans on the U.S. Supreme
Court to stop the counting of
votes in Florida. Then, on his first
day in office, his counsel Alberto
Gonzales drafted an executive
order for Bush that postponed
release of the Reagan-Bush
records.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks, Bush approved another
secrecy order that put the records
beyond the public's reach
indefinitely, passing down control
of many documents to a
President's or a Vice President's
descendants.
Thus, the truth about how the
Reagan-Bush era began in the
1980s - and what was done to
contain the Iran-Contra
investigations in the late 1980s
and early 1990s - might eventually
become the property of the noted
scholars, the Bush twins, Jenna
and Barbara.
The American people will be kept
in the dark about their own history,
like the subjects of some
hereditary dynasty. Without the
facts, they also face the possibility
of being more easily manipulated
by emotional appeals devoid of
informed debate
That moment has come sooner
than many expected. The United
States appears to be on the brink
of a war with Iran, while many
government officials and the
citizenry are operating on
historical assumptions derived
more from fiction than fact.
--------
Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and
Newsweek. His latest book,
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the
Bush Dynasty from Watergate
to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com.
It's also available at Amazon.com,
as is his 1999 book, Lost History:
Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
"Project Truth."
“HOW THE
2004 ELECTION
WAS STOLEN”
Republicans prevented more than
350,000 voters in Ohio from casting
ballots or having their votes counted
— enough to have put John Kerry
in the White House.
___ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
ROLLING STONE, APRIL,2006,
Key points from the article.
After carefully examining the evidence,
I’ve become convinced that the
president’s party mounted a massive,
coordinated campaign to subvert the
will of the people in 2004.
Across the country, Republican
election officials and party stalwarts
employed a wide range of illegal and
unethical tactics to fix the election. A
review of the available data reveals
that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000
voters, the overwhelming majority of
them Democratic, were prevented
from casting ballots or did not have
their votes counted in 2004(12) —
more than enough to shift the results
of an election decided by 118,601
votes.(13) In what may be the single
most astounding fact from the
election, one in every four Ohio
citizens who registered to vote in 2004
showed up at the polls only to
discover that they were not listed on
the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to
stem the unprecedented flood of
Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14)
And that doesn?t even take into
account the troubling evidence of
outright fraud, which indicates that
upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry
were counted instead for Bush. That
alone is a swing of more than 160,000
votes — enough to have put John
Kerry in the White House.(15)
Then there is the issue of the exit polls.
On the evening of the vote, reporters
at each of the major networks were
briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry,
they were informed, had an
insurmountable lead and would win by
a rout:at least 309 electoral votes to
Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to
call (28) In London, Prime Minister
Tony Blair went to bed contemplating
his relationship with President-elect
Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on
the West Coast, exit polls showed
Kerry ahead in ten of eleven
battleground states — including
commanding leads in Ohio and Florida
— and winning by a million and a half
votes nationally. The exit polls even
showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s
neck in supposed GOP strongholds
Virginia and North Carolina.(30)
Against these numbers, the statistical
likelihood of Bush winning was less
than one in 450,000.(31) ‘’Either the
exit polls, by and large, are completely
wrong,’’ a Fox News analyst declared, ‘’
or George Bush loses.’’(32)
But as the evening progressed,
official tallies began to show
implausible disparities — as much
as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls.
In ten of the eleven battleground
states, the tallied margins departed
from what the polls had predicted.
In every case, the shift favored Bush.
Based on exit polls, CNN had
predicted Kerry defeating Bush
in Ohio by a margin of 4.2
percentage points.
Instead, election results
showed Bush winning the
state by 2.5 percent.
Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more
than the polls had predicted in
Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent
more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman,
a visiting scholar at the University
of Pennsylvania who specializes in
research methodology, the odds
against all three of those shifts
occurring in concert are one in
660,000. ‘’As much as we can say
in sound science that something
is impossible,’’ he says,
‘’ it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted
and actual vote count in the three
critical battleground states of the
2004 election could have been
due to chance or random error.’’
The key question of course are -
“How did this happen?”
and even more importantly
“How can we prevent it from
happening again?”
To determine that we have
to look at what actually did occur.
The core issues.
Kenneth Blackwell
John Conyers states...
‘’Blackwell made Katherine Harris look
like a cupcake,’’
Conyers told me. ‘’He saw his role as
limiting the participation of Democratic
voters. We had hearings in Columbus
for two days. We could have stayed
two weeks, the level of fury was so
high. Thousands of people wanted to
testify. Nothing like this had ever
happened to them before.’’
When ROLLING STONE confronted
Blackwell about his overtly partisan
attempts to subvert the election, he
dismissed any such claim as ‘’silly on
its face.’’ Ohio, he insisted in a
telephone interview, set a ‘’gold
standard’’ for electoral fairness.
In fact, his campaign to subvert the will
of the voters had begun long before
Election Day. Instead of welcoming the
avalanche of citizen involvement
sparked by the campaign, Blackwell
permitted election officials in
Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to
conduct a massive purge of their voter
rolls, summarily expunging the names
of more than 300,000 voters who had
failed to cast ballots in the previous
two national elections.(55) In
Cleveland, which went five-to-one for
Kerry, nearly one in four voters were
wiped from the rolls between 2000 and
2004.(56)
The Strike Force
(“Knock ‘em off the Rolls”)
To stem the tide of new registrations,
the Republican National Committee
and the Ohio Republican Party
attempted to knock tens of thousands
of predominantly minority and urban
voters off the rolls through illegal
mailings known in electioneering
jargon as caging.
During the Eighties, after the GOP
used such mailings to disenfranchise
nearly 76,000 black voters in New
Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to
sign two separate court orders
agreeing to abstain from caging.(63)
But during the summer of 2004, the
GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio
by zip code, sending registered letters
to more than 200,000 newly registered
voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65)
On October 22nd, a mere eleven days
before the election, Ohio Republican
Party Chairman Bob Bennett — who
also chairs the board of elections in
Cuyahoga County — sought to
invalidate the registrations of 35,427
voters who had refused to sign for the
letters or whose mail came back as
undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the
challenged voters were from
Democratic strongholds in and around
Cleveland.(67)
Barriers to Registration (“Keep ‘em off
the rolls”)
To further monkey-wrench the
process he was bound by law to
safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane
elections regulation to make it harder
to register new voters.
In a now-infamous decree,
Blackwell announced on
September 7th — less than a
month before the filing deadline
— that election officials would
process registration forms only if
they were printed on eighty-pound
unwaxed white paper stock,
similar to a typical postcard.
Justifying his decision to ROLLING
STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an
attempt to protect voters: ‘’The postal
service had recommended to us that
we establish a heavy enough paper-
weight standard that we not
disenfranchise voters by having their
registration form damaged by postal
equipment.’’ Yet Blackwell’s order also
applied to registrations delivered in
person to election offices. He further
specified that any valid registration
cards printed on lesser paper stock
that miraculously survived the
shredding gauntlet at the post office
were not to be processed; instead,
they were to be treated as
applications for a registration form,
requiring election boards to send out
a brand-new card.(90)
In one of his most effective
maneuvers, Blackwell prevented
thousands of voters from receiving
provisional ballots on Election Day.
The fail-safe ballots were mandated in
2002, when Congress passed a
package of reforms called the Help
America Vote Act. This would prevent
a repeat of the most egregious
injustice in the 2000 election, when
officials in Florida barred thousands of
lawfully registered minority voters from
the polls because their names didn’t
appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under
the law, would-be voters whose
registration is questioned at the polls
must be allowed to cast provisional
ballots that can be counted after the
election if the voter’s registration
proves valid.(114)
The Wrong Pew
(“Even if they still show up
to vote, don’t let it count”)
‘’Provisional ballots were supposed to
be this great movement forward,’’ says
Tova Andrea Wang, an elections
expert who served with ex-presidents
Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the
commission that laid the groundwork
for the Help America Vote Act. ‘’But
then different states erected barriers,
and this new right became totally
eviscerated.’’
The Long Lines
(“Wait ‘em out”)
When Election Day dawned on
November 2nd, tens of thousands of
Ohio voters who had managed to
overcome all the obstacles to
registration erected by Blackwell
discovered that it didn’t matter
whether they were properly listed on
the voting rolls — because long lines
at their precincts prevented them from
ever making it to the ballot box. Would-
be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati
routinely faced waits as long as three
hours. Those in inner-city precincts in
Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo —
which were voting for Kerry by margins
of ninety percent or more — often
waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon
College, students were forced to stand
in line for eleven hours before being
allowed to vote, with the last voters
casting their ballots after three in the
morning.(132)
The long lines were not only
foreseeable — they were actually
created by GOP efforts. Republicans
in the state legislature, citing new
electronic voting machines that were
supposed to speed voting, authorized
local election boards to reduce the
number of precincts across Ohio. In
most cases, the new machines never
materialized — but that didn’t stop
officials in twenty of the state’s eighty-
eight counties, all of them favorable to
Democrats, from slashing the number
of precincts by at least twenty percent.
(136)
Faulty Machines
(“Change the Vote”)
Voters who managed to make it past
the array of hurdles erected by
Republican officials found themselves
confronted by voting machines that
didn’t work. Only 800,000 out of the
5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on
electronic voting machines, but they
were plagued with errors.(164) In
heavily Democratic areas around
Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters
reported entering ‘’Kerry’’ on the touch
screen and watching ‘’Bush’’ light up,
at least twenty machines had to be
recalibrated in the middle of the voting
process for chronically flipping Kerry
votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ‘’vote
hopping’’ from Kerry to Bush was
reported by voters and election
officials in other states.)(166)
Elsewhere, voters complained in
sworn affidavits that they touched
Kerry’s name on the screen and it lit
up, but that the light had gone out by
the time they finished their ballot; the
Kerry vote faded away.(167)
In the state’s most notorious incident,
an electronic machine at a
fundamentalist church in the town
of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258
votes for Bush and 260 votes for
Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however,
there were only 800 registered voters,
of whom 638 showed up.(169)
(The error, which was later blamed on
a glitchy memory card, was corrected
before the certified vote count.)
Rural Counties
(Stuffing the Box)
Despite the well-documented effort
that prevented hundreds of thousands
of voters in urban and minority
precincts from casting ballots, the
worst theft in Ohio may have quietly
taken place in rural counties. An
examination of election data suggests
widespread fraud — and even good
old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes
— in twelve sparsely populated
counties scattered across southern
and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown,
Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland,
Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van
Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve
Suspect Counties) One key indicator
of fraud is to look at counties where
the presidential vote departs radically
from other races on the ballot. By this
measure, John Kerry’s numbers were
suspiciously low in each of the twelve
counties — and George Bush’s were
unusually high.
How might this fraud have been
carried out? One way to steal votes is
to tamper with individual ballots —
and there is evidence that
Republicans did just that.
In Clermont County, where optical
scanners were used to tabulate votes,
sworn affidavits by election observers
given to the House Judiciary
Committee describe ballots on which
marks for Kerry were covered up with
white stickers, while marks for Bush
were filled in to replace them.
Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI,
described the testimony as ‘’strong
evidence of vote tampering if not
outright fraud.’’ (184) In Miami County,
where Connally outpaced Kerry, one
precinct registered a turnout of 98.55
percent (185) — meaning that all but
ten eligible voters went to the polls on
Election Day.
An investigation by the Columbus
Free Press, however, collected
affidavits from twenty-five people who
swear they didn’t vote. (186)
In addition to altering individual
ballots, evidence suggests that
Republicans tampered with the
software used to tabulate votes.
In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost
not only to Connally but to two other
defeated Democratic judicial
candidates, voters cast their ballots on
touch-screen machines. (187) Two
weeks before the election, an
employee of ES&S, the company that
manufactures the machines, was
observed by a local election official
making an unauthorized log-in to the
central computer used to compile
election results. (188) In Miami
County, after 100 percent of precincts
had already reported their official
results, an additional 18,615 votes
were inexplicably added to the final
tally. The last-minute alteration
awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush,
boosting his margin of victory in the
county by nearly 6,000. (189)
The Phony Terrorism Alert
The most transparently crooked
incident took place in Warren County.
In the leadup to the election, Blackwell
had illegally sought to keep reporters
and election observers at least 100
feet away from the polls. (190) The
Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree
represented an unconstitutional
violation of the First Amendment,
noted ominously that ‘’democracies
die behind closed doors.’’ But the
decision didn’t stop officials in Warren
County from devising a way to count
the vote in secret. Immediately after
the polls closed on Election Day, GOP
officials — citing the FBI — declared
that the county was facing a terrorist
threat that ranked ten on a scale of
one to ten.
The county administration building
was hastily locked down, allowing
election officials to tabulate the results
without any reporters present.
Last Step: Rigging the Recount
After Kerry conceded the election, his
campaign helped the Libertarian and
Green parties pay for a recount of all
eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under
state law, county boards of election
were required to randomly select three
percent of their precincts and recount
the ballots both by hand and by
machine. If the two totals reconciled
exactly, a costly hand recount of the
remaining votes could be avoided;
machines could be used to tally the
rest.
But election officials in Ohio worked
outside the law to avoid hand
recounts. According to charges
brought by a special prosecutor in
April, election officials in Cleveland
fraudulently and secretly pre-counted
precincts by hand to identify ones that
would match the machine count. They
then used these pre-screened
precincts to select the ‘’random’’
sample of three percent used for the
recount.
From the list of issues a series of
talking points can be constructed,
to push back against those who would
argue that all of this is “tin-foil hattery”
and sour grapes on the part of
democrats.
If not to illegally skew the vote what
was the justification for...
· The Exit Polls being so far off,
that they far exceeded a statistical
improbability?
· The purge of inactive voters
centered on Democratic Strongholds?
· The use of illegal registered
letters to “Cage” Democratic Voters?
· Blackwell’s requiring 80 lbs stock
for registration cards, and then
supplying non-80 lbs stock to voters?
· Some (Democratic) voters
having to wait up to 7 hours (in the
rain)?
· There being no safeguards to
protect the electronic tabulators from
tampering?
· The mysterious “Level Ten”
Terror alert during the counting?
· why “Pre-counting” was
premitted?
The key to all of this is tying the
actions and events specifically to
the actions of authorized Republicans
such as Blackwell and the RNC.
We’re certain to hear claims that there
was no deliberate malice involved,
that there were Democratic election
offices involved in many of these
decisions - but none of that changes
the fact that in each and every case -
a problem generated more votes for
Bush and less for Kerry in a critical
“Battleground State”.
I have to admit, that when things
originally went down I was skeptical
that a deliberate theft of the election
had taken place. The amount of the
vote discrepancy seemed to large,
too massive. It couldn’t be possible
that nearly 3 Million votes national
wide could have been shifted from
Kerry to Bush, could it?
But the fact is such as shift isn’t really
neccesary. All they needed was a few
hundred here, and a few hundred
there in key or close districts and
states.
In order to protect what’s left of our
Democracy, and particularly the
integrity of future elections
(such as 2006) we need to be ready
to challenge these and similar tactics
before it’s too late. We have to act
Now, and the first thing to do is
prepare LTE’s asking why every
newspaper in the country isn’t
running this story.
It doesn’t matter if they agree with
Kennedy, we just need them to
address the issue — keep the noise
machine spinning - let them try and
argue against the facts and science.
They ignored Conyers.
They ignored Miller.
We can’t afford to let them ignore
Kennedy, whose planned a massive
media sweep to support his article.
It’s our Democracy, and our duty
to protect it.
Just remember your Ghandhi :
”First they ignore you, then
they laugh at you, then they
fight you - then you win.”
____________Vyan, Daily Kos
2004 ELECTION
WAS STOLEN”
Republicans prevented more than
350,000 voters in Ohio from casting
ballots or having their votes counted
— enough to have put John Kerry
in the White House.
___ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
ROLLING STONE, APRIL,2006,
Key points from the article.
After carefully examining the evidence,
I’ve become convinced that the
president’s party mounted a massive,
coordinated campaign to subvert the
will of the people in 2004.
Across the country, Republican
election officials and party stalwarts
employed a wide range of illegal and
unethical tactics to fix the election. A
review of the available data reveals
that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000
voters, the overwhelming majority of
them Democratic, were prevented
from casting ballots or did not have
their votes counted in 2004(12) —
more than enough to shift the results
of an election decided by 118,601
votes.(13) In what may be the single
most astounding fact from the
election, one in every four Ohio
citizens who registered to vote in 2004
showed up at the polls only to
discover that they were not listed on
the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to
stem the unprecedented flood of
Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14)
And that doesn?t even take into
account the troubling evidence of
outright fraud, which indicates that
upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry
were counted instead for Bush. That
alone is a swing of more than 160,000
votes — enough to have put John
Kerry in the White House.(15)
Then there is the issue of the exit polls.
On the evening of the vote, reporters
at each of the major networks were
briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry,
they were informed, had an
insurmountable lead and would win by
a rout:at least 309 electoral votes to
Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to
call (28) In London, Prime Minister
Tony Blair went to bed contemplating
his relationship with President-elect
Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on
the West Coast, exit polls showed
Kerry ahead in ten of eleven
battleground states — including
commanding leads in Ohio and Florida
— and winning by a million and a half
votes nationally. The exit polls even
showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s
neck in supposed GOP strongholds
Virginia and North Carolina.(30)
Against these numbers, the statistical
likelihood of Bush winning was less
than one in 450,000.(31) ‘’Either the
exit polls, by and large, are completely
wrong,’’ a Fox News analyst declared, ‘’
or George Bush loses.’’(32)
But as the evening progressed,
official tallies began to show
implausible disparities — as much
as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls.
In ten of the eleven battleground
states, the tallied margins departed
from what the polls had predicted.
In every case, the shift favored Bush.
Based on exit polls, CNN had
predicted Kerry defeating Bush
in Ohio by a margin of 4.2
percentage points.
Instead, election results
showed Bush winning the
state by 2.5 percent.
Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more
than the polls had predicted in
Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent
more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman,
a visiting scholar at the University
of Pennsylvania who specializes in
research methodology, the odds
against all three of those shifts
occurring in concert are one in
660,000. ‘’As much as we can say
in sound science that something
is impossible,’’ he says,
‘’ it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted
and actual vote count in the three
critical battleground states of the
2004 election could have been
due to chance or random error.’’
The key question of course are -
“How did this happen?”
and even more importantly
“How can we prevent it from
happening again?”
To determine that we have
to look at what actually did occur.
The core issues.
Kenneth Blackwell
John Conyers states...
‘’Blackwell made Katherine Harris look
like a cupcake,’’
Conyers told me. ‘’He saw his role as
limiting the participation of Democratic
voters. We had hearings in Columbus
for two days. We could have stayed
two weeks, the level of fury was so
high. Thousands of people wanted to
testify. Nothing like this had ever
happened to them before.’’
When ROLLING STONE confronted
Blackwell about his overtly partisan
attempts to subvert the election, he
dismissed any such claim as ‘’silly on
its face.’’ Ohio, he insisted in a
telephone interview, set a ‘’gold
standard’’ for electoral fairness.
In fact, his campaign to subvert the will
of the voters had begun long before
Election Day. Instead of welcoming the
avalanche of citizen involvement
sparked by the campaign, Blackwell
permitted election officials in
Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to
conduct a massive purge of their voter
rolls, summarily expunging the names
of more than 300,000 voters who had
failed to cast ballots in the previous
two national elections.(55) In
Cleveland, which went five-to-one for
Kerry, nearly one in four voters were
wiped from the rolls between 2000 and
2004.(56)
The Strike Force
(“Knock ‘em off the Rolls”)
To stem the tide of new registrations,
the Republican National Committee
and the Ohio Republican Party
attempted to knock tens of thousands
of predominantly minority and urban
voters off the rolls through illegal
mailings known in electioneering
jargon as caging.
During the Eighties, after the GOP
used such mailings to disenfranchise
nearly 76,000 black voters in New
Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to
sign two separate court orders
agreeing to abstain from caging.(63)
But during the summer of 2004, the
GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio
by zip code, sending registered letters
to more than 200,000 newly registered
voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65)
On October 22nd, a mere eleven days
before the election, Ohio Republican
Party Chairman Bob Bennett — who
also chairs the board of elections in
Cuyahoga County — sought to
invalidate the registrations of 35,427
voters who had refused to sign for the
letters or whose mail came back as
undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the
challenged voters were from
Democratic strongholds in and around
Cleveland.(67)
Barriers to Registration (“Keep ‘em off
the rolls”)
To further monkey-wrench the
process he was bound by law to
safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane
elections regulation to make it harder
to register new voters.
In a now-infamous decree,
Blackwell announced on
September 7th — less than a
month before the filing deadline
— that election officials would
process registration forms only if
they were printed on eighty-pound
unwaxed white paper stock,
similar to a typical postcard.
Justifying his decision to ROLLING
STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an
attempt to protect voters: ‘’The postal
service had recommended to us that
we establish a heavy enough paper-
weight standard that we not
disenfranchise voters by having their
registration form damaged by postal
equipment.’’ Yet Blackwell’s order also
applied to registrations delivered in
person to election offices. He further
specified that any valid registration
cards printed on lesser paper stock
that miraculously survived the
shredding gauntlet at the post office
were not to be processed; instead,
they were to be treated as
applications for a registration form,
requiring election boards to send out
a brand-new card.(90)
In one of his most effective
maneuvers, Blackwell prevented
thousands of voters from receiving
provisional ballots on Election Day.
The fail-safe ballots were mandated in
2002, when Congress passed a
package of reforms called the Help
America Vote Act. This would prevent
a repeat of the most egregious
injustice in the 2000 election, when
officials in Florida barred thousands of
lawfully registered minority voters from
the polls because their names didn’t
appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under
the law, would-be voters whose
registration is questioned at the polls
must be allowed to cast provisional
ballots that can be counted after the
election if the voter’s registration
proves valid.(114)
The Wrong Pew
(“Even if they still show up
to vote, don’t let it count”)
‘’Provisional ballots were supposed to
be this great movement forward,’’ says
Tova Andrea Wang, an elections
expert who served with ex-presidents
Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the
commission that laid the groundwork
for the Help America Vote Act. ‘’But
then different states erected barriers,
and this new right became totally
eviscerated.’’
The Long Lines
(“Wait ‘em out”)
When Election Day dawned on
November 2nd, tens of thousands of
Ohio voters who had managed to
overcome all the obstacles to
registration erected by Blackwell
discovered that it didn’t matter
whether they were properly listed on
the voting rolls — because long lines
at their precincts prevented them from
ever making it to the ballot box. Would-
be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati
routinely faced waits as long as three
hours. Those in inner-city precincts in
Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo —
which were voting for Kerry by margins
of ninety percent or more — often
waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon
College, students were forced to stand
in line for eleven hours before being
allowed to vote, with the last voters
casting their ballots after three in the
morning.(132)
The long lines were not only
foreseeable — they were actually
created by GOP efforts. Republicans
in the state legislature, citing new
electronic voting machines that were
supposed to speed voting, authorized
local election boards to reduce the
number of precincts across Ohio. In
most cases, the new machines never
materialized — but that didn’t stop
officials in twenty of the state’s eighty-
eight counties, all of them favorable to
Democrats, from slashing the number
of precincts by at least twenty percent.
(136)
Faulty Machines
(“Change the Vote”)
Voters who managed to make it past
the array of hurdles erected by
Republican officials found themselves
confronted by voting machines that
didn’t work. Only 800,000 out of the
5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on
electronic voting machines, but they
were plagued with errors.(164) In
heavily Democratic areas around
Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters
reported entering ‘’Kerry’’ on the touch
screen and watching ‘’Bush’’ light up,
at least twenty machines had to be
recalibrated in the middle of the voting
process for chronically flipping Kerry
votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ‘’vote
hopping’’ from Kerry to Bush was
reported by voters and election
officials in other states.)(166)
Elsewhere, voters complained in
sworn affidavits that they touched
Kerry’s name on the screen and it lit
up, but that the light had gone out by
the time they finished their ballot; the
Kerry vote faded away.(167)
In the state’s most notorious incident,
an electronic machine at a
fundamentalist church in the town
of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258
votes for Bush and 260 votes for
Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however,
there were only 800 registered voters,
of whom 638 showed up.(169)
(The error, which was later blamed on
a glitchy memory card, was corrected
before the certified vote count.)
Rural Counties
(Stuffing the Box)
Despite the well-documented effort
that prevented hundreds of thousands
of voters in urban and minority
precincts from casting ballots, the
worst theft in Ohio may have quietly
taken place in rural counties. An
examination of election data suggests
widespread fraud — and even good
old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes
— in twelve sparsely populated
counties scattered across southern
and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown,
Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland,
Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van
Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve
Suspect Counties) One key indicator
of fraud is to look at counties where
the presidential vote departs radically
from other races on the ballot. By this
measure, John Kerry’s numbers were
suspiciously low in each of the twelve
counties — and George Bush’s were
unusually high.
How might this fraud have been
carried out? One way to steal votes is
to tamper with individual ballots —
and there is evidence that
Republicans did just that.
In Clermont County, where optical
scanners were used to tabulate votes,
sworn affidavits by election observers
given to the House Judiciary
Committee describe ballots on which
marks for Kerry were covered up with
white stickers, while marks for Bush
were filled in to replace them.
Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI,
described the testimony as ‘’strong
evidence of vote tampering if not
outright fraud.’’ (184) In Miami County,
where Connally outpaced Kerry, one
precinct registered a turnout of 98.55
percent (185) — meaning that all but
ten eligible voters went to the polls on
Election Day.
An investigation by the Columbus
Free Press, however, collected
affidavits from twenty-five people who
swear they didn’t vote. (186)
In addition to altering individual
ballots, evidence suggests that
Republicans tampered with the
software used to tabulate votes.
In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost
not only to Connally but to two other
defeated Democratic judicial
candidates, voters cast their ballots on
touch-screen machines. (187) Two
weeks before the election, an
employee of ES&S, the company that
manufactures the machines, was
observed by a local election official
making an unauthorized log-in to the
central computer used to compile
election results. (188) In Miami
County, after 100 percent of precincts
had already reported their official
results, an additional 18,615 votes
were inexplicably added to the final
tally. The last-minute alteration
awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush,
boosting his margin of victory in the
county by nearly 6,000. (189)
The Phony Terrorism Alert
The most transparently crooked
incident took place in Warren County.
In the leadup to the election, Blackwell
had illegally sought to keep reporters
and election observers at least 100
feet away from the polls. (190) The
Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree
represented an unconstitutional
violation of the First Amendment,
noted ominously that ‘’democracies
die behind closed doors.’’ But the
decision didn’t stop officials in Warren
County from devising a way to count
the vote in secret. Immediately after
the polls closed on Election Day, GOP
officials — citing the FBI — declared
that the county was facing a terrorist
threat that ranked ten on a scale of
one to ten.
The county administration building
was hastily locked down, allowing
election officials to tabulate the results
without any reporters present.
Last Step: Rigging the Recount
After Kerry conceded the election, his
campaign helped the Libertarian and
Green parties pay for a recount of all
eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under
state law, county boards of election
were required to randomly select three
percent of their precincts and recount
the ballots both by hand and by
machine. If the two totals reconciled
exactly, a costly hand recount of the
remaining votes could be avoided;
machines could be used to tally the
rest.
But election officials in Ohio worked
outside the law to avoid hand
recounts. According to charges
brought by a special prosecutor in
April, election officials in Cleveland
fraudulently and secretly pre-counted
precincts by hand to identify ones that
would match the machine count. They
then used these pre-screened
precincts to select the ‘’random’’
sample of three percent used for the
recount.
From the list of issues a series of
talking points can be constructed,
to push back against those who would
argue that all of this is “tin-foil hattery”
and sour grapes on the part of
democrats.
If not to illegally skew the vote what
was the justification for...
· The Exit Polls being so far off,
that they far exceeded a statistical
improbability?
· The purge of inactive voters
centered on Democratic Strongholds?
· The use of illegal registered
letters to “Cage” Democratic Voters?
· Blackwell’s requiring 80 lbs stock
for registration cards, and then
supplying non-80 lbs stock to voters?
· Some (Democratic) voters
having to wait up to 7 hours (in the
rain)?
· There being no safeguards to
protect the electronic tabulators from
tampering?
· The mysterious “Level Ten”
Terror alert during the counting?
· why “Pre-counting” was
premitted?
The key to all of this is tying the
actions and events specifically to
the actions of authorized Republicans
such as Blackwell and the RNC.
We’re certain to hear claims that there
was no deliberate malice involved,
that there were Democratic election
offices involved in many of these
decisions - but none of that changes
the fact that in each and every case -
a problem generated more votes for
Bush and less for Kerry in a critical
“Battleground State”.
I have to admit, that when things
originally went down I was skeptical
that a deliberate theft of the election
had taken place. The amount of the
vote discrepancy seemed to large,
too massive. It couldn’t be possible
that nearly 3 Million votes national
wide could have been shifted from
Kerry to Bush, could it?
But the fact is such as shift isn’t really
neccesary. All they needed was a few
hundred here, and a few hundred
there in key or close districts and
states.
In order to protect what’s left of our
Democracy, and particularly the
integrity of future elections
(such as 2006) we need to be ready
to challenge these and similar tactics
before it’s too late. We have to act
Now, and the first thing to do is
prepare LTE’s asking why every
newspaper in the country isn’t
running this story.
It doesn’t matter if they agree with
Kennedy, we just need them to
address the issue — keep the noise
machine spinning - let them try and
argue against the facts and science.
They ignored Conyers.
They ignored Miller.
We can’t afford to let them ignore
Kennedy, whose planned a massive
media sweep to support his article.
It’s our Democracy, and our duty
to protect it.
Just remember your Ghandhi :
”First they ignore you, then
they laugh at you, then they
fight you - then you win.”
____________Vyan, Daily Kos
| “An Opening for Change” - A Message from the Executive Director Like you, I am heartened that the American electorate has demanded change. I am greatly heartened that more pro-peace candidates have replaced incumbents in a Congress that has been a rubber stamp for the Bush Administration's tragic and deadly misadventure in Iraq - as well as a host of disastrous foreign policy choices that have only exacerbated dangerous situations around the world while destroying our ability to lead other nations. But now, after the election, our celebration must be tempered by the sober recognition of the work that lies before us. The occupation of Iraq and threat of war with Iran are not simply past actions of an administration that need to be investigated, but ongoing, continually developing crises that need to be addressed, immediately, to prevent even further chaos and massive loss of life. Hearings are absolutely necessary, but they are not sufficient. The newly-elected Congress can not spend two years simply investigating the missteps of the Bush Administration - it must act to change our nation's foreign policy, and immediately. It is this Congress' job to do the will of the people that elected them. And while we understand that there are many issues facing the new Congress, the #1 issue that must be dealt with, the issue that created the need for a new Congress, is the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq. Delay on this issue is not an option. Some congressional staff have told us that even with a new Congress, it could still take five years to bring all our troops home from Iraq. We cannot and will not accept such a delay in ending our military occupation of that nation. So the Democrats have a job to do. But even more importantly, so do we, the peace movement and citizens of this country. We cannot let up the pressure now, not for an instant. In fact, this is precisely the moment we must begin to increase the pressure. Thousands upon thousands of lives depend on our ability to ramp up pressure to make this new Congress actually do what was demanded of it in this election. (And the mandate for peace is even larger than it appears, given the corporate money, voting irregularities, Republican chicanery, Democratic “centrism,” gerrymandering and powers of incumbency which all serve to suppress the pro-peace vote.) And so, while we should still feel good and even celebrate yesterday's election results, particularly the large numbers of you who worked for candidates, or supported the Peace Action PAC or Peace Voter campaigns, or whom signed the Voters for Peace Pledge or helped produce this election result in any number of other ways, we cannot rest on our laurels, or sit back and wait for the Democrats to take action. We must compel them to take action. You will hear from us soon on our next steps. In the meantime, I thank you again for everything you do for peace, and look forward to continuing to walk this long and difficult, but beautiful, road to peace with you. Kevin Martin, Executive Director Peace Action for a Sane World |
