The New Watergate: U.S. Attorneys and Voting Rights

The Bush administration is shocked, shocked, that the firing of a few U.S. attorneys has caused such a stir in Washington. After all, the Oval Office says, the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. But the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor's job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power - by manipulating voting rights - than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.

This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor-thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.

Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute "voter fraud" cases. "Voter fraud" has "become almost synonymous with 'voting while black,'" the New York Times' Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.

Former staffers in the Justice Department's civil rights division said they were "repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters," Krugman added.

The administration's effort to prosecute voter fraud is a sham. The New York Times reports that voter experts have found "widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." However, the Election Assistance Commission, a federal panel charged with election research, skewed the findings of the voter experts.

The Bush administration has been hyping voter fraud since the last election; Karl Rove called it an "enormous and growing" problem. Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias from Albuquerque and John McKay from Seattle, were dismissed because they refused to file voter fraud charges after being warned to do so by well-placed Republicans. Others were fired for pursuing investigations of Republicans.

Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former right-hand man, wrote in an email that the qualification to be a U.S. attorney was to be a "loyal Bushie."

Shortly after the Watergate break-in, President Richard Nixon and his loyal chief of staff H.R. Haldeman spoke in the old Executive Office Building. Their conversation was taped, but 18.5 minutes were erased. This gap incriminated Nixon in the cover-up which eventually led to his impeachment and resignation.

Likewise, there is a suspicious 16-day gap in the email records between the Justice Department and the White House just before seven of the U.S. attorneys were fired in December. Moreover, many of the communications about the matter were conducted using email accounts of the Republican National Committee instead of government accounts, possibly in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The Los Angeles Times reported that senior Justice Department officials prepared documentation to justify the firings after the dismissals. One Justice Department official threatened to "retaliate" against the eight fired U.S. attorneys if they continued to publicly speak about their dismissals.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who heads the Justice Department, denied he was involved in discussions about the firings. But Sampson testified that Gonzales was consulted at least five times and signed off on the plan to fire the U.S. attorneys. "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he [Gonzales] said," Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gonzales is reportedly sweating bricks over his own testimony before that Committee, slated for April 17. As a result of Gonzales' stonewalling in response to the House Judiciary Committee's request for documents, committee chairman Rep. John Conyers has subpoenaed the records. If the Justice Department defies the subpoena, the Judiciary Committee, and the full Congress, could cite the department for contempt of Congress, and a federal grand jury could issue criminal indictments for obstruction of justice.

The White House has indicated it will not allow Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify under oath. Why the resistance unless they intend to lie?

Alberto Gonzales should be fired, not just for malfeasance in the U.S. attorney affair, but also for advising Bush to violate the Geneva Conventions which led to torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Recall that Gonzales told Bush the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete." Those were the same words the Nazi lawyers used at Nuremberg to describe the Geneva Conventions.

Firing Gonzales may temporarily stanch the flood of accusations about the U.S. attorney matter. But the corruption, the lawbreaking, and the cover-up go deeper - all the way up to the Oval Office. Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers will put impeachment back on the table.

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US Pulls the Strings in Haiti

Laden with heavy security, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a quick visit to Haiti on Tuesday. Her mission: to reassure Haiti's interim government that the United States wants the elections to go forward in November, and to see to it that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide does not return to Haiti.

Once again, the US is manipulating Haiti.

On February 29, 2004, the United States had forcibly removed President Aristide from Haiti, then maintained that he voluntarily resigned. President Aristide had been elected with 80 percent of the vote. True to form, the Bush administration, which claims to love democracy, engineered a coup d'etat and removed a democratically-elected leader of another country.

The Aristides are now in South Africa, which granted them asylum. On August 31, President Aristide issued a statement, cautioning that free and fair elections could not take place in Haiti until the thousands of Lavalas [the pro-Aristide party comprised mostly of Haiti's poor] who are in jail and in exile are free to return home, the repression that has already killed over 10,000 people ends immediately, and national dialogue begins.

President Aristide asked, "In 1994, who could have expected free, fair and democratic elections in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and other leaders and members of the African National Congress in jail, exile or in hiding?"

Two prominent Lavalas leaders are in jail. Rev. Fr. Gérard Jean Juste, who has been in custody for two months, was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. More than 400 interfaith religious leaders have signed a letter asking for Fr. Jean Juste's release. Former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune has been jailed for 16 months, with no charges against him. Both men are in frail health.

The United Nations maintains a peacekeeping force of 8,000 in Haiti. I asked Mildred Aristide, the President's wife, what role the UN has played in Haiti's problems. She told me: "Before the coup in February 2004 - up until that very day - the constitutional government requested assistance from the UN to help defend Haitians from the murderous band of former soldiers, drug dealers, and thugs who were set on destabilizing the country and killing innocent people."

How did the UN respond? It "stood by and allowed a democratically elected President, along with nearly 7,000 elected officials, to be removed from office," Mrs. Aristide said. Only then, she added, did the UN vote to send an intervention force to Haiti.

"Credible reports of UN complicity in human rights abuses have surfaced," Mrs. Aristide noted. "The UN has been forced to investigate allegations. The Haitian Police distribute machetes to hooded attachés, gun down innocent demonstrators, systematically raid poor slums, disappear prisoners turned over to them by the UN - all under the official sanction of the UN which voted to exercise control over the police."

Referring to the police and the UN, Mrs. Aristide said, "The people of Haiti who are under siege are hard pressed to see any distinction among their repressors." Both Haiti's police and the UN force are enabled by United States political and economic clout.

When Rice was in Haiti Tuesday, she made clear the US does not want President Aristide to return to Haiti. "The Haitian people are moving on," Rice said.

But things in Haiti are not going according to "script," says Mrs. Aristide. Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs in the State Department, resigned. In August, Haiti's interim government released the imprisoned Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a leader of the vicious Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a paramilitary group blamed for thousands of killings during the military dictatorship that ruled Haiti after forcing President Aristide from power in 1991. James B. Foley, the US Ambassador to Haiti, left his post in August for unknown reasons. Foley called Chamblain's release a "sham," especially in light of Neptune's continued incarceration with no evidence against him. Foley characterized Neptune's detention as "a violation of human rights, an injustice and an abuse of power."

"Kidnappings, murder and other crimes have become widespread in Haiti since the interim government came to power a year-and-a-half ago," Rep. Maxine Waters (CA) said in an August statement.

On August 20, police accompanied by machete-wielding civilians attacked a soccer crowd of thousands, shooting or hacking to death at least six and as many as 30 spectators. "Our tax dollars were at both ends of the killing," Brian Concannon, Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, told the Congressional Black Caucus last week. "The soccer game was sponsored by a USAID program, to promote peace in the neighborhood. The US also sponsors the killers, the Haitian National Police, by providing guns and weapons despite a consistent history of police killing over the last 18 months."

"Roads and infrastructure have fallen into disrepair, and public services have virtually disappeared. The interim government has done nothing to stem the growing violence in the country, and it has done nothing to make millions of dollars in promised aid from international donors available to the Haitian people," said Rep. Waters. "Just about the only thing the interim government has done is jail hundreds of political prisoners."

Since President Aristide's ouster, thousands of people have demonstrated to protest the horrific conditions, and the interim government has responded with violence against the people. Spurred by the US to take a more "proactive role" in going after armed pro-Aristide gangs, UN troops have engaged in "a wave of Fallujah-like collective punishment inflicted on neighborhoods known for supporting Aristide," according to Naomi Klein.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has documented that 18 months after President Aristide was forced out of the country, Haiti remains insecure and volatile. Much of the population displays "disenchantment, apathy and ignorance about the electoral process," the ICG found.

The IGC reported that "a week before the scheduled close of registration, only 870,000 [of 4 million] potential voters had registered, and none had yet received the new national identity card required to vote."

Although Rice tried to put a positive gloss on Haiti's prospects for fair and free elections, "Haiti is in the midst of a comprehensive program of electoral cleansing," said Concannon. "Its ballots are being cleansed of political dissidents, its voting rolls cleansed of the urban and rural poor. The streets are being cleansed of anti-government political activity," he said.

Lavalas supporters have said they will not participate in the elections unless political prisoners are released, political persecutions are ended, and President Aristide is returned to Haiti. Senior officials at Canada's Foreign Affairs Department admit that Lavalas remains Haiti's most popular party. Thus, an election without Lavalas would be sham.

On June 28, the House of Representatives passed Rep. Barbara Lee's resolution to block arms transfers to Haiti. The State Department responded by announcing on August 9 that it would send $1.9 million worth of guns and other equipment to the police before the elections and presumably before the Senate could vote on the resolution, according to Concannon.

Rep. Waters' proposed amendment to H.R. 2601 provides good standards for evaluating conditions in Haiti as the elections approach, in Concannon's opinion. It requests adequate security, disarmament of paramilitary groups, and trials or release for the political prisoners. Concannon stresses the importance of the opportunity to vote, to organize, and to campaign.

Haitians are still demonstrating in spite of the repression. Haitian democracy supporters are planning a demonstration in Port-au-Prince tomorrow to commemorate the anniversary of the 1991 coup against President Aristide, which they have done every September 30 since 1996. The interim government has outlawed all demonstrations until October 2. That decree "is as unconstitutional in Haiti as it would be in the US and most other countries," said Concannon.

Demonstrations and other Haiti solidarity events will be held in 38 cities in 14 countries on or around September 30.

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Litigating the Election

Without much fanfare, a number of lawyers are busy mounting court challenges to the election. Lawsuits have been filed and other actions are being taken in Ohio and Florida, the two key electoral states. Members of Congress have demanded a General Accountability Office investigation of the election. The largest Freedom of Information Act request in the nation's history has been launched, and other efforts are in the works.

Is there substance to these challenges? On Thursday, the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to Bush in Florida. The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. The official tally in Florida shows Bush with 380,978 more votes than Kerry.

Recount, Lawsuits, Hearings in Ohio

Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik have sought a recount of the votes in Ohio. A demand for a recount can only be filed by a presidential candidate who was on the ballot or a certified write-in candidate. Alleged improprieties in Ohio include mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines, and the targeted disenfranchisement of African-American voters. Although a recount doesn't typically begin until after the vote has been certified (December 6), Cobb and Badnarik have asked for the recount to proceed forthwith for fear there won't be sufficient time to complete the recount in time for the December 13 date on which the Ohio presidential electors will meet.

Bush now leads Kerry by about 136,000 votes in Ohio. A battle is looming over nearly 155,000 provisional ballots, which might decide who really won the election. The Ohio Democratic Party has joined a lawsuit by elector Audrey J. Schering, which asks U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to impose uniform standards for counting provisional ballots on all 88 counties. The lawsuit cites the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Bush v. Gore, which "held that the failure to provide specific standards for counting of ballots that are sufficient to assure a uniform count statewide violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution." Attorney Donald J. McTigue, who filed the suit, told me that although many of the provisional ballots are being counted, his client is concerned about those that are not being counted. Blackwell has provided only limited instruction about which provisional ballots to count. But many doubts remain about how different election boards determine whether someone is a registered voter. Some may type the name in on a computer; others may look for typographical errors; still others may look at the hard copy. McTigue worries that there is no way of knowing what each board is doing. Do they go back to the purged files? Were they properly purged?

Of the 11 counties that had completed checking provisional ballots by Wednesday, 81 percent have been ruled valid. McTigue expects the counting of provisional ballots to last at least two more weeks.

On Election Day, Sarah White filed a class action against Blackwell and the Board of Elections of Lucas County, claiming they violated the Help America Vote Act, passed in the wake of the 2000 election debacle, that gives voters in federal elections a right to cast provisional ballots. White claimed that although she requested an absentee ballot one month before the election, she never received one. Blackwell ruled that persons who had requested, but not received their absentee ballots, would not be permitted to cast a provisional ballot. U.S. District Judge David A. Katz, however, ordered that "the Board of Elections of Lucas County shall immediately advise all precincts to issue provisional ballots to those voters who appear at the voting place and assert their eligibility to vote, including that the voter is a registered voter in the precinct in which he or she desires to vote, and that the voter is eligible to vote in an election for Federal office."

Last week, the Ohio Election Protection Coalition held public hearings in Columbus. Extensive sworn and written testimony of Ohio voters, precinct judges, poll workers, legal observers, and party challengers revealed a widespread and concerted effort by Blackwell to deny primarily African-American and young voters the right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time. Precincts were deprived of adequate numbers of voting machines, so voters waited in lines from 2-7 hours, even though 68 electronic voting machines remained in storage and were never used on Election Day. Blackwell, who oversaw the election in Ohio, also served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. Lawyers for the Ohio Election Protection Coalition plan to use the testimony from the Columbus hearings to challenge the results of Ohio's presidential vote in the state Supreme Court next week.

Lawsuits in Florida

On Election Day, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Florida Legal Services sued Miami-Dade County and Broward County election officials in U.S. District Court for denying voters sufficient time to mail in absentee ballots. The Broward County Supervisor of Elections sent 13,300 absentee ballots to voters late. Plaintiffs Fay Friedman, Adam Meyer, and Daniel Benhaim claimed the two counties violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First and Fourteenth Amendments because they did not receive their absentee ballots until Election Day, and it was therefore impossible to comply with state law requiring persons who are out-of-state but present in the U.S. to submit absentee ballots by 7 P.M. on Election Day. Under Florida state law, a separate rule gives more time to absentee voters outside the U.S., who may postmark their ballots by November 2 as long as the ballot arrives within 10 days after the election. JoNel Newman, a Florida Legal Services attorney, says, "The rules governing absentee ballots should apply equally to every voter, whether they are temporarily in other parts of the country or overseas." On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Alan Gold denied plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction to include the late ballots in the final vote tally; however, the lawsuit remains alive for trial on a request to apply the late counting rule used for foreign absentees to domestic ballots.

Opponents of slot machines at South Florida pari-mutuels filed a lawsuit seeking an official recount of about 78,000 absentee ballots cast in Broward County on Amendment 4. About 94 percent of the new votes on the amendment were "yes" and only 6 percent were "no," a "statistical anomaly." No hearing has yet been scheduled on the case.

Recount in New Hampshire

Pursuant to a request by Ralph Nader, votes in some New Hampshire towns are being recounted. An analysis showed wide differences in voting trends between the 2000 and 2004 elections; about three quarters of precincts with severe changes used Diebold optical scanning machines. Last week, Diebold agreed to pay $2.6 million to settle a lawsuit with the state of California. Diebold officials misled state leaders about the security and certification of its products to get payments from the state, according to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Diebold is headed by Republican CEO Wally O'Dell. Last year, O'Dell wrote to Ohio Republican donors, saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

Lawsuits Challenge Mayoral Results in San Diego

Election results in San Diego's mayoral race remain in doubt. The unofficial tally shows Mayor Dick Murphy the victor. But write-in votes for Donna Frye have been excluded because voters did not darken the oval on the left of the line where they wrote in Frye's name. A lawsuit seeks to force the county registrar of voters to count the excluded write-in votes, which many believe will tip the results in her favor. Two other lawsuits are attempting to have Frye's candidacy ruled illegal and force a runoff between Murphy and Supervisor Ron Roberts. Frye ran on a platform critical of Murphy's financial leadership and the culture of secrecy at City Hall.

Congressmen Request GAO Investigation

Three members of Congress - John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler - wrote to the Government Accountability Office on November 5, requesting an immediate investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration. The Congressmen cited an electronic voting system in Columbus, Ohio, that gave Bush 4,000 extra votes; an electronic tally of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative that failed to record thousands of votes; a North Carolina county that lost more than 4,500 votes due to a mistaken belief by officials that a computer that stored ballots could hold more data than it did; a substantial drop off in Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was apparently not present in counties using other mechanisms; and numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties in Florida, that voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw their votes instead recorded as votes for Bush.

Freedom of Information Act Requests

Blackboxvoting.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection group for elections, has filed the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history. It seeks the internal computer logs (which are public records ) from voting machines from every county that used electronic voting machines. The organization has initiated fraud investigations in selected counties. It needs lawyers to enforce public records laws, as well as computer security professionals and citizen volunteers.

Open Records Act Motions

Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, told me that independent testing of voting machines could shed light on why so many people who tried to vote for Kerry saw their votes registered for Bush. Her organization is moving under the Open Records Act, which allows people to see government records, to gather information, including the impoundment of voting machines, in some counties in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and Pennsylvania that had serious problems with the machines. Local counsel are needed to help with this effort. Cohn can be contacted at cindy@eff.org.

Results Not Final Until January

Although John Kerry conceded that George W. Bush won the election, a candidate's concession is not legally binding. Electors will be certified on December 7, which gives a presumption of legitimacy to the vote; but electors actually vote on December 13. These votes are not opened by Congress until January 6, so there is still time to challenge the results in key states such as Ohio and Florida. A challenge requires a written objection from one House member and one senator. If that objection is recorded, both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.

Bush is claiming he has a mandate, planning to spend his "political capital." Curiously, virtually all of the so-called "anomalies" in the voting results favor Bush. The electors have not yet voted; the election results are not yet final. In the words of Yogi Berra, "It's not over until it's over."

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U.S. Elections in Iraq & Afghanistan:

Officials in the Bush administration are singing in unison that the way to neutralize the terrorists is to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. They cite the election set for January 30 in Iraq, and yesterday's election in Afghanistan, as Exhibits A and B.

At the second presidential debate in St. Louis on Friday night, George W. Bush hailed the Afghan election as a "marvelous thing," claiming his rout of the Taliban set the table for the milestone in Afghanistan.

During the vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney tried to demonstrate his superior foreign policy acumen by drawing an analogy between the upcoming Afghan elections and those in El Salvador twenty years ago. Cheney claimed a "guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections."

It is noteworthy that Cheney said "we" held those elections, not the Salvadorans. The Salvadoran elections were as phony as a Yankee three-dollar bill. In fact, the United States - and Cheney as a Congressional election observer - was not supporting freedom in El Salvador at that time. Most of those killed were civilians murdered by the U.S.-backed junta and paramilitary "death squads." The Salvadoran elections were not free elections. Only conservatives and right-wing parties fielded candidates; the leftist politicians had been assassinated or driven underground.

The Afghan elections are looking as bogus as the Salvadoran elections that Cheney touted. The day after the second presidential debate, all 15 presidential candidates running against U.S.-backed interim president Hami Karzai boycotted the race, alleging fraud. The Associated Press now reports that two of those candidates have withdrawn from the boycott. They want a commission to determine whether the voting was fair and will accept its decision. Their demands appear to have been met.

The only woman running refused to cast a ballot in protest. "In the morning I was prepared to vote," she said, "but within the past three hours I've received calls from voters that this is not a free and fair election. The ink that is being used can be rubbed off in a minute. Voters can vote 10 times!" The day after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported that Major General Eric Olson, the operations commander for U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, calls this problem, "Afghanistan's hanging chad."

"Today's election is not a legitimate election," said another candidate. "It should be stopped and we don't recognize the results," he added. An Islamic poet, also a candidate, complained, "Today was a very black day. Today was the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections."

His sentiment was echoed by Sonali Kolhatkar, President of the Afghan Women's Mission. She told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, "This whole election has been organized by the United States. The Afghan people have not had any hand in organizing their own election, the timeline of the election."

Voter registration numbers were inaccurate or fabricated, according to Christian Parenti, journalist from The Nation. He was able to secure two valid voter registration cards and he's not Afghan. Human rights organizations said some people received four or five cards; they thought they could use them to receive humanitarian aid.

Weeks before the election, several candidates charged that U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad, known to many as "the Viceroy" or a "puppet-master," pressured them not to run against Bush's sweetheart Karzai. The New York Times reported Friday that Karzai's close relationship with his "American overseers" has proved tricky. The interim prez controls nothing outside of Kabul, and only leaves his home under heavy American guard, due to attempts on his life.

Both Khalizad and Karzai happen to be former consultants to oil giant Unocal, which, backed by the Bush administration, negotiated with the Taliban for an oil pipeline to run through Afghanistan. It was when those talks broke down, long before September 11, that Bush set his sights on regime change in Afghanistan.

Sound familiar? That brings us to Iraq. There, also, the tactic of invasion followed by election is critical to Bush's campaign for a second term in the White House. Bush paints a rosy picture for an American electorate nervous about the steady carnage in Iraq. The Bushies ceremoniously "transferred full sovereignty" to the Iraqis just before the end of June. They hand-picked Iyad Allawi, with close ties to the CIA, as interim prime minister. The Bush administration solemnly promises to hold elections in Iraq on January 30.

Allawi, recently on the campaign trail with Bush in New York, said that holding the elections on time was "the most important task entrusted to us." Most likely, those elections will install Allawi as chief U.S. puppet in Iraq. Given the situation on the ground there, it is counter-intuitive to believe free and fair elections could take place on January 30. Fighting is fierce throughout Iraq. Jordan's King Abdullah II said last week it would be "impossible to organize indisputable elections" in the midst of the current chaos in Iraq.

The Associated Press reports that when Donald Rumsfeld had a brief exchange with journalists in Baghdad yesterday, he grew agitated by questions about the possibility of needing extra U.S. troops before the Iraqi elections. "There's a fixation on that subject!" he said, exasperated. "It's fascinating how everyone is locked in on that."

Why do reporters in Baghdad have that fixation? "Half of the country remains a 'no go zone' - out of the hands of the government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists," Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi wrote in an email to friends last week from Baghdad. "In the other half," she said, "the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war."

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan cautions there can be no "credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now." Indeed, last week, two organizations representing more than 60,000 United Nations staffers urged Annan to pull all U.N. staff out of Iraq because of the "unprecedented" risk to their safety and security.

The Chicago Tribune reports that diplomats and military officials admit conducting elections in communities in at least six provinces would be extremely risky if not impossible. But Allawi advocates holding the election even if 300,000 people out of Iraq's 27 million weren't able to vote.

Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that communities like Fallujah can simply be skipped, so the election can proceed apace: "And let's say you tried to have an election, and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country, but some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said recently. "Well, that's - so be it. Nothing's perfect in life. So you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he affirmed. Kinda like Florida in 2000 - close enough for government work.

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The Preemptive President

Under the guise of preempting - or preventing - threats to the American people, George W. Bush has acted aggressively to "jump the gun" throughout his presidency. By the use of extreme rhetoric and scare tactics, Team Bush convinced Congress - and nearly half the electorate - that the guns he was jumping were real. The guns, however, proved illusory, and indeed, backfired, making us less safe.

"The pool of people who really hate us is so much greater than it was on 9/11 because of this needless and counterproductive war in Iraq," Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, told a crowd of nearly 2,000 in Berkeley earlier this week.

Moreover, following our role model, Russia has just announced that it, too, will engage in preemptive strikes against terrorist bases in "any region of the world." This announcement comes as the United States is issuing statements favoring a political settlement with Chechen separatists. The chickens have, in the prescient words of Malcolm X, come home to roost.

Preempting Saddam's Continuing Presidency

Since the day Bush took office, his administration planned assiduously for the execution of regime change in Iraq. The September 11 attacks played right into Bush's hands. From that day on, his masterful spinners spun - and continue to spin - a massive web of lies and deception to link Saddam Hussein with those attacks.

Declaring over and over again that we have to get the terrorists in Iraq so they don't get us here, Bush secured Congressional authority to invade Iraq.

Never mind that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam having been neutered by the Gulf War and 12 years of punishing sanctions.

Never mind that, vicious as Saddam was to his own people, al Qaeda never operated in Iraq until "Iraqi Freedom" became the Operation-du-jour.

Never mind that Bush sent our boys and girls to kill and be killed in a war that had no business ever happening. Never mind that the number of dead Americans has now topped 1,000, and the number of Iraqi dead is estimated at 20,000, with no end in sight.

And never mind that Bush's theory of preemptive war violates the United Nations Charter.

The only thing Bush's war on Iraq has preempted is the continuation of Saddam's control of a country over which the neoconservatives itched to establish hegemony.

Preempting Dissent Against Bush Policies

Bush has sought to preempt the dissent that's inimical to the democracy he claims to defend by systematically suppressing criticism of his dangerous policies.

Whenever the Bush administration has faced collective action challenging its policies, it has used law enforcement to preempt First Amendment activity. (See my editorial, Bush's War on Democracy).

The police have employed collective preemptive punishment to keep dissenters off the streets and out of the media, most recently, in New York during the Republican Convention.

For months, the FBI preemptively identified and interrogated potential demonstrators, in an attempt to chill constitutionally-protected free speech. Agents surfed the Web, checking websites used by protest organizers.

The media was utilized to scare would-be protestors away from demonstrations. For example, two companion articles in the May 17, 2004 issue of New York Magazine hyped the upcoming protests. One headline read: "The Circus is Coming to Town: A Bush-hating nation of freaks, flash-mobbers, and civil-disobedients is gathering to spoil the GOP's party." The other headline taunted, "Cops to Protestors: Bring It On."

Trying to paint protestors as potential weapons-of-mass destruction, the latter article depicts them as violent "wannabe revolutionaries and anarchists." It describes the artillery the police would have in its arsenal: "vehicle checkpoints around the perimeter of the [Madison Square] Garden manned with heavy weapons, dogs, and portable Delta barriers, which are enormous metal contraptions that lie almost flat in the road and can be raised very quickly with the flip of a switch. They are substantial enough to stop a large truck."

Police arrived at protest sites in advance of demonstrators, and preempted marches and rallies before they occurred.

The cops established "free speech" zones and used orange netting to unconstitutionally enmesh protestors and cart them off to jail. They conducted pretextual and "preventive" mass false arrests and detentions. A record number of arrests - nearly 2,000 - were made during the four-day GOP convention. This tops even those effectuated during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

New York State Judge John Cataldo angrily ordered the City of New York to release more than 550 arrestees, who were illegally detained without being brought before a judge. When the city dragged its feet, Judge Cataldo held the city in contempt and ordered a fine of $1,000 for each person still held.

The National Lawyers Guild circulated an Internal Police Department memo suggesting that protestors be held as long as possible, presumably to keep them off the streets for the duration of the convention.

Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people protested Bush's convention, swelling to half a million on the Sunday before it began.

Preempting Regime Change in America

The tactics of Team Bush in its drive to preempt a Kerry victory in November are setting a record for the dirtiest tricks in an election campaign.

In an attempt to shift the focus from Bush's going AWOL in the National Guard, Karl Rove's Brigade has smeared the battlefield credentials of a real war hero, John Kerry.

And in order to draw attention away from the fact that the September 11 attacks occurred on Bush's watch, Dick Cheney blurted out that Americans face another terrorist attack if they elect Kerry: "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

To get a clear reading on how well George W. Bush will protect us against a terrorist attack, one need only examine the just-released records from his service in the Texas Air National Guard. They show his unit joined a "24 hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack" in the southern United States beginning October 6, 1972. That was a time when his pay records show that Bush failed to report for duty.

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Modern Ballot Box Stuffing: Can We Trust Team Bush?

Democracy requires consent of the governed. Consent is measured by the results of fair and free elections. The midwives of our democracy were the founders who made the Revolution, and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement that gave birth to The Voting Rights Act of 1964.

As we approach the November presidential election, the media treats us to daily updates on the razor-thin margin between the candidates as measured by the polls. The issues that divide Bush from Kerry are parsed in print and on television. We debate the state of the economy, the growing deficit, job loss, terrorism, and the War on Iraq.

Our conversations assume that voters, guided by the differences between the candidates on the issues, will go to the polls and cast their votes freely and fairly.

Casting a pall over that assumption, however, is the memory of Florida 2000, where 537 votes separated Bush from Gore. A confluence of factors led to the anointing of Bush as President.

A black vote in Florida was 50 percent more likely to be "spoiled"- and thus not counted - than a white vote, according to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

"Florida's 2000 felon purge program resulted in over 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised," said Ion Sancho, Supervisor of Elections for Leon County in Florida.

And then there were the five members of the Supreme Court who diverged from their traditional deference to "states' rights" by second-guessing the Florida courts. The conservative justices who handed the election to Bush became one-time champions of "equal protection of the laws" when they stopped the recounting of ballots.

The horrors of hanging and dimpled chads led many to sing the praises of electronic balloting. One of the corporations that manufactures touch-screen voting machines is Diebold Election Systems. Its chief executive, Walden O'Dell, told Republicans in an August 14, 2003 fundraising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." As the state of Ohio will be pivotal in the upcoming election, O'Dell's statement galvanized Democrats to demand a "paper trail" for all votes.

Thanks to the efforts of organizations such as MoveOn.Org, TrueMajority, VerifiedVoting.org, and ACT, all votes cast in Ohio in November will now have a paper trail.

But Election Data Services estimates that nearly 30 percent of voters in the presidential election will not vote in systems that produce paper to be used if a recount becomes necessary.

David Dill, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, has no evidence of a conspiracy to fix the election. But, he told me, "We know people would steal elections if they get the chance, and it wouldn't be hard to steal." The easiest way to commit fraud, according to Dill, would be by an insider at the company, a programmer who makes a hidden change to the software. With the current procedures, he said, there's "not a ghost of a chance" the culprit would be caught.

Nearly 100 million of the 115 million votes cast in November will be tabulated by computers owned by four private corporations. Besides O'Dell's Diebold, Election Systems and Software, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic will count 5 out of 6 of the votes. Tom Hicks, one of Hart's principal investors, has close financial ties with Bush.

Dill says, "It is not sufficient for an election to be accurate - the public has to know it's accurate." After Senator Max Cleland, the odds-on favorite to win reelection in Georgia in 2002, was defeated, 1 in 8 voters were "not very confident" or "not at all confident" that touch-screen voting machines had produced accurate results. Thirty-two percent were only "somewhat confident.”

Professor Dill advocates transparency in the process. People should watch, and audit trails must exist. With electronic voting, we can't see inside the machine. Dill admits that paper ballots result in fraud as well, but we can see them; they're transparent. He's worried about a system that's vulnerable to theft. Professor Dill endorses the optical scan system, which electronically scans the vote, and creates a paper backup.

In both the 2002 general election and the March 2004 presidential primary in Florida, there was a higher percentage of undervotes in counties that used touch-screen machines than in those using optical scanners. Undervotes occur when a voter apparently fails to make any choice at all. Moreover, nearly all the electronic records - 8 percent of the vote - from the 2002 primary in Miami-Dade County have been lost, leaving no audit trail. Voters using the touch-screen machines were 6 times as likely to record no votes as those in counties using optical scan machines. This suggests the possibility that intended votes were not recorded for some reason.

There is a bill pending in the House of Representatives that would require a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy of every vote cast. H.R. 2239 has 150 co-sponsors. Dill maintains it is possible to provide paper backup for all votes cast in November, but thinks it "extremely unlikely," as the bill is bottled up in committee. He does predict it might pass with an amendment requiring compliance by 2006. A similar bill by Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton, and co-sponsored by seven Democrats and one Independent, is pending in the Senate.

A June editorial in The New York Times decried the foibles of electronic voting machines, which, it claimed, are less secure than slot machines: "Voting machine standards are out of date and inadequate. Machines are still tested with standards from 2002 that have gaping security holes. Nevertheless, election officials have rushed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy them.”

An additional cause for concern is the wrongful disenfranchisement of ex-felons. Republicans planning another mass purge in Florida were caught with their pants down when a judge forced them to reveal that Hispanics - who notoriously vote Republican there - were excluded from the purge. (With Bush's latest anti-Cuba travel ban alienating many Florida Cubans, however, all bets are off on their votes).

Ion Sancho is alarmed at the lack of data to support the accuracy of Florida's new felon purge list database for 2004: "As the Supervisor of Elections for Leon County," Sancho said, "I will not be party to any effort, program or activity which may deny the voting rights of our citizens. I am outraged that our State officials, in an apparent pursuit of some imaginary voting fraud problem, are once again pursuing an ill-conceived program which may once again lead to the disenfranchisement of thousands of Floridians.”

In 2000, Florida denied the vote to 6 percent of its voting age citizens, 16 percent of its black voting age citizens, and 31 percent of its black citizen voting age men.

California attorney John R. Cosgrove argues in a new article in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review that the disenfranchisement of ex-felons in many states violates the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment carves out an exception to the Equal Protection Clause - intended to promote black male suffrage - for men who have committed a crime. Cosgrove maintains that this provision only excludes from voting those men who have committed crimes that were felonies at common law. Drug crimes, for example, are not common law crimes. He also notes there is no legal basis to disenfranchise female ex-felons.

The "Protect American Voters Act of 2004, "with 29 co-sponsors, is pending in the House of Representatives. It would require States to provide notice and an opportunity for review prior to removing any individual from the official list of eligible voters by reason of criminal conviction or mental incapacity.

It all boils down to trust. When Bush told us he was a "compassionate conservative," he said: trust me. When he assured us he would pursue a "humble foreign policy" with no "nation-building," he said: trust me. When Bush said Iraq was an imminent threat to us, he said: trust me. When he reassured us that the torture of prisoners was the work of but a few bad apples, he said: trust me. And most recently, when he raised the terror alert based on years-old intelligence data, he said: trust me.

Can we really trust this man, who has consistently lied to us about the most important matters of national security, not to engage in dirty tricks in the November election?

With many still smarting from the 2000 election stolen by George W. Bush, some have taken to quoting Joseph Stalin, who said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." But Professor Dill, the voting rights champion, cautions against pessimism that would lead people to sit out the election. Even if the only option is touch screen voting without a paper trail, says Dill, "don't stay away from the polls." Our lives depend on it.

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High Court Hides From Camera in Bush v. Gore

When the Supreme Court entertained arguments last Friday that could determine who will be the 43rd president of the United States, it worked virtually in private. Unlike the Florida Supreme Court, which let the sunshine (and television cameras) into the hearing that gave the green light to hand-counted ballots, the highest court in the land convened before just 80 members of the public.

The nine justices of the United States Supreme Court refuse to allow television coverage of their hearings. Reasons given range from protection of their personal privacy to preservation of the Court’s mystique. Chief Justice William Rehnquist told a 1992 judges’ conference that if the justices didn’t look good on camera, “it would lessen to a certain extent some of the mystique and moral authority” of the Court.

Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, once passed a group of anti-abortion protestors during his noontime stroll. Unrecognized, he stood and looked on as they railed against the rights protected by the bystander’s most famous decision.

Twenty-three hours before the Supreme Court’s 1989 hearing in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which many thought might overturn Roe v. Wade, hopeful spectators began lining up in front of the Supreme Court building to vie for the few public seats. A scalper sold the eleventh place in line for $100.

The Supreme Court has held that there is a right to a public trial. But it is not clear whether a public trial means a televised trial. When a defendant appears in court, there may be valid reasons for excluding a camera, if the publicity could harm his or her constitutional right to a fair trial. But when the Supreme Court hears arguments, there are no witnesses or jurors to be influenced or intimidated by the cameras.

Although Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a group of University of Virginia law students that she generally favors gavel-to-gavel cameras in the courtroom, she didn't specifically include the Supreme courtroom. She said: “The problem is the dullness of most court proceedings,” adding, “It’s often tedious.”

Justice Antonin Scalia once told an audience condescendingly that “law is a specialized field, fully comprehensible only to the expert.”

Yet millions sat glued to their television sets two weeks ago as the Florida Supreme Court grappled with technical legal issues of statutory construction. The High Court on Friday was faced with deciding whether the Florida Supreme Court violated federal law or the United States Constitution. Public interest in this hearing was overwhelming. It is imperative that the American public, so polarized in this post-election limbo, perceives the ultimate decision-making process as a fair one.

The Supreme Court’s denial of the petition filed by C-Span and CNN to allow cameras to televise Friday’s arguments was a foregone conclusion. As Justice David Souter told a House Appropriations subcommittee in 1996: “The day you see a camera come into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.”

However, the Court took a small but significant step by allowing an immediate release of an audiotape of the proceedings, which in ordinary circumstances, wouldn’t be released for several months. In 1955, Chief Justice Earl Warren inaugurated the practice of audiotaping oral arguments. But although the tapes were turned over to the National Archives, scholars who checked them out had to sign a lending agreement that they wouldn’t reproduce them. University of California-San Diego political science professor Peter Irons defied the agreement in 1993 and marketed the tapes with a transcript entitled “May It Please the Court.” The Court, furious, threatened “legal remedies” but never followed through with its threat.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told conference attendees in Colorado a few years ago: “Eventually we will probably have television. But it probably won’t be for a good while.” How long a while that will be is anyone’s guess. Hopefully, Justice Souter will live to see the day.

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