'Fight Smart' Update - 17 April 2005

Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE

Bush Presidential 'Victory'
New Academic Report Raises Spectre Of
US Electronic Voting Fraud
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATBinLadenVVotingmachines2.htm
'Bin Laden And The Voting Machines' Revisited
The Post-Election Evidence

"We in the United States are not a banana republic"
Tereza Heinz Kerry, Seattle, 5 March 2005

"The wife of last year's democrat presidential candidate John Kerry says the United States presidential election could have been computer hacked.
Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush's victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes. She said two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States, and that it is very easy to hack into the mother machines. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that Mrs Heinz Kerry was urging Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, and reminded the public that the United States was not a banana republic."
New claims US election 'hacked'
Australian Associated Press, 10 March 2005

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday... The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate. The report also called into question new voting machine technologies. 'All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,' the report concludes."
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, 1 April 2005

"Last month, experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct's results by 100,000 votes without leaving a trace. More than 40 million votes in 30 states were cast on such computer systems....."
Global Eye
Moscow Times, 8 April 2005

"Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II. Bush's erosion of support among independents in particular has helped bring his overall approval rating down to 45 percent. ....
Bush's Poll Numbers Worst on Record
Washington Post, 11 April 2005

"Although 45 percent of Americans polled say they support George Bush, five months ago candidate George Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. In five months, then, millions of Americans have moved from voting for George Bush to not supporting him. Who are these Americans?"
Americans Increasingly Reject Bush
Intervention Magazine, 10 April 2005

The Inauguration Of President George W Bush 20 January 2005 'President Bush gives a thumbs-up to Chief Justice William Rehnquist' Photo - TIME magazine, European Print Edition p 38/39, 31 January 2005 'Celebration And Dissent'

"The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance. Edison/Mitofsky disavowed the results of their own poll, saying that the data cannot be construed as evidence that the official vote count was corrupted, and hypothesized that Kerry voters were more amenable to completing the poll questionnaire than Bush voters.  However, Edison/Mitofsky's own exit poll data does not support their theory that a higher exit poll response rate by Kerry voters accounted for the discrepancies between the exit polls and the presidential election results. Using Edison/Mitofsky’s data tables we demonstrate that the 'reluctant Bush responder' hypothesis is implausible because it is inconsistent with the combination of high response rates and high discrepancy rates among the precincts with the highest percentage for Bush." Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Graph from Summary Report Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 (Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities) Statistical Analysis Showing High Difference Between Official Election Results And Exit Polls Where Votes Counted By Machine In 2004 Presidential Election (compared with low difference where hand counted paper ballots used) WPE = 'Within Precinct Error' Table 7: Median WPE by voting equipment Main Report (p18) "Hand counted paper ballots were used primarily in rural districts .... Precincts with paper ballots, used primarily in rural precincts, showed a median WPE of –0.9, consistent with chance, while all other technologies were associated with unexplained high WPE discrepancies between election and exit poll results...." Main Report (p18)

"[Before the election] On the CNBC TV show 'Topic A With Tina Brown,' several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real 'counting' is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a 'central tabulator' machine. That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. 'In a voting system,' Harris explained to Dean on national television, 'you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?' Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. 'What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer.'  'So,' Dean said, 'anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?' Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. 'This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees,' she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software....[Harris then demonstrated how to hack the program]. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'   On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said... Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide....So far, the only national 'mainstream' media to come close to this story was [MSNBC's] Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed...." Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked Common Dreams, 6 November 2004

"The recent and ongoing proliferation of sophisticated computerized vote recording and tallying equipment, much of it unverifiable and hence 'faith-based', dramatically augments the opportunities for wholesale and outcome-determinative distortions of the vote counting process. That the lion's share of this equipment is developed, provided, and serviced by partisan private corporations only amplifies these serious concerns. The fact that, in the 2004 election, all voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party certainly warrants further inquiry. The absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unblinking investigation."
Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005
(Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities)

'Bin Laden And The Voting Machines' Revisited - You Were Warned

Two days before the US 2004 Presidential election 'Fight Smart' issued a bulletin entitled 'Bin Laden and The Voting Machines'. It questioned which would be the bigger influence on the outcome of the election - the sudden appearance of a video tape of Osama Bin Laden verbally attacking America just days before voting, or the much feared domestic manipulation of electronic voting machines to fraudulently skew the official result.

Senator John Kerry, the loser in the election contest, has since gone on record stating that he thinks his defeat was down to the Bin Laden tape. At the end of January Kerry told NBC "I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday."

But others are not so sure. And they claim to have tight statistical evidence to support their case, particularly as Kerry was significantly ahead in exit polls on election day itself.

A group of academics working under the auspices of the public interest group 'USCountVotes' has now produced a fresh analysis of exit poll data in the Presidential election. This group comprises mathematicians and statistical analysts at the Universities of Temple, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, Illinois, Notre Dame, Cornell, Case Western Reserve and the Southern Methodist University.

Extracts of their paper dated 31 March are provided below. The bottom line is that significant discrepancies between the official election result and the exit polls were found where machine voting (mechanical, touch screen, punch cards, and optical scan) was used, whereas the tallied vote fell within the margin of error for exit polls where hand counted (i.e. not scanned) paper ballots were used. This analysis is based on exit poll data provided by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International who were on contract with major national press and TV news services, operating collectively as the National Election Pool for the election.

At the time of the release of the Bin Laden tape there was much debate about its significance. Did it help or hinder Bush? Some even wondered whether the tape was a fake given that we now live in the era of sophisticated digital video editing (remember how Oliver Read still featured in scenes of 'Gladiator' even after the actor had died of a heart attack part way through filming?).

Meanwhile it is worth noting that in American elections even mechanical machine votes and most paper ballots (via optical scanners) are ultimately counted electronically by programmed tabulator computers. The answer they give is, of course, ultimately determined by how those computers function.

According to a report 6 November 2004 by the Common Dreams alternative news web service: "[Before the election] On the CNBC TV show 'Topic A With Tina Brown,' several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real 'counting' is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a 'central tabulator' machine. That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. 'In a voting system,' Harris explained to Dean on national television, 'you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?' Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. 'What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer.'  'So,' Dean said, 'anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?' Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. 'This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees,' she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software....[Harris then demonstrated how to hack the program]. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'   On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said... Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide...."

But Harris has not left it there. According a report on her web site 8 March 2005 "In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked. This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.... The hack ..... was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person. This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for their investigation."

So if electronic voting fraud were to have taken place during the US Presidential election (and from the work now emerging out of several university departments following the election there is clearly a prima facie case to be answered here), then the principal significance of the Bin Laden tape may have been rather different to that proffered by Kerry when attempting to explain his surprise defeat to NBC.

In those circumstances the main impact of the tape (with which Kerry's own response is not incompatible) would have been to divert attention away from the more serious issue voiced by many prior to polling day - namely, the spectre of voting machine fraud. As 'Fight Smart' put it 31 October "If an attempt to tamper with electronic votes in key swing states were to be made on Tuesday then an 'intelligent' fraud would, of course, be to fix the numbers in such a way that the result was sufficiently close to look plausible. The media punditry would probably still be too diverted discussing the impact of the sudden arrival of Bin Laden on the election scene to notice in any case."

'Hypothetically' speaking, therefore, the arrival of such a tape close to polling could deliver a most fortuitous distraction of public attention serving to the clear benefit of anyone planning to perpetrate a voting fraud on behalf of the eventual 'victor', especially in an otherwise close race. And certainly the presumed overriding importance of the October 2004 Bin Laden tape tipping the result of the election in Bush's favour is now apparently taken as read by Senator Kerry himself.

Yet, this is despite the as yet unexplained awkward contradiction of the exit polls on voting day itself, a remarkable discrepancy about which the Senator has made little public comment (Kerry says he was sliding in opinion polls just before voting, but exit polls taken directly from those who have actually voted are normally regarded as more reliable, and so far Kerry seems to have remained silent on this).

By contrast, however, Kerry's more outspoken wife went on public record in March stating that she thinks the election may have been electronically hacked. According to a piece entitled 'New claims US election hacked' published by the Australian Associated Press 10 March "The wife of last year's democrat presidential candidate John Kerry says the United States presidential election could have been computer hacked. Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush's victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes. She said two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States, and that it is very easy to hack into the mother machines. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that Mrs Heinz Kerry was urging Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, and reminded the public that the United States was not a banana republic."

Indeed, given the post-election statistical work completed to date by several university departments, outstanding questions over the potential abuse of machine vote counting in the 2004 election remain more than of just hypothetical interest.

So where have the mainstream media been through all of this? Have you seen them reporting on the latest collaborative research organised under the auspices of 'USCountVote' and involving academics from nine US Universities?

Well, most likely not (unless perhaps you happen to be a keen reader of the English language press in Cuba). But at least the Guardian in Britain ran a rare post-US election piece on 2 February written by former Blair Minister, Michael Meacher, highlighting some of the scope for computer based voting fraud during the 2004 contest for the White House - and indeed for future elections (in a separate article in the Independent 5 April Meacher also reports on apparently successful US efforts to rig the Iraqi elections by covertly reducing the Shia vote using more conventional methods of ballot fraud).

However, unless people look up and start paying attention to such warnings then we can expect to kiss further goodbye to accountable government all too soon. Indeed, the 'detention without trial' Blair Government in Britain is already contemplating following America's lead with the possible introduction of electronic voting sometime after 2006, and doubtless other countries will then follow on too (Blair's Labour party has already had court convictions made against members who have been involved in postal-ballot rigging, with such actions being urged in a national Labour party document according to a report in the London Times 10 December 2004).

Unless, that is, there is a large scale and vigorous public revolt to nip these corrosive developments in the bud just in the nick of time. With Anglo-American sponsored vote fraud now apparently widespread in countries such as the USA, Britain and Iraq, a global protest on this subject is being organised for May Day 2005 (click here if you wish to participate).

Experience has shown that blatant political deception in Britain and America is not a rare occurrence. It is endemic.

The recent exposure of the British government's al Qaeda 'ricin' plot claim as bogus is simply one more outrageous revelation in the long stream of Anglo-American fraud used to manipulate the public will into supporting a malicious transatlantic agenda.

This claim was used as part of Colin Powell's WMD case at the UN Security Council to promote international backing for an unprovoked attack against Iraq, and by Tony Blair to frighten the British public in the run up to the crucial parliamentary vote on the proposed war. According to the Sunday Herald 17 April the British government's Porton Down laboratory has effectively acknowledged that ricin is in fact unsuitable for use as a WMD in any case as one of its own documents presented at the case trial stated that there is "no reliable scientific evidence … that suggests ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin".

Let us be clear about this.

As demonstrated during the last few days by the Guardian, Independent, and Sunday Herald in the case of the ricin scam (in stark contrast other media such as the Telegraph, and the Times which managed to produce the astonishingly extravagant front page headline "The al-qaeda plot to poison Britain" from the same story, even though the charge of "conspiracy to commit acts of Islamist terrorism by killing innocent civilians" against the principal accused had been dropped), this agenda is ruthlessly promoted on the back of scaremonging claims known full well by parts of the authorities to be false or exaggerated (for more on how public opinion is manipulated through the placement of false information in the press by the intelligence services see the allegations concerning 'Operation Mass Appeal' by Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and US marine intelligence officer).

We have been somewhere like this before.

Remember that tyranny rose to absolute power in Europe in the middle of the last century through the manipulative use of the democratic process, and that the German public who were sucked into that oppressive abuse of power (goaded by Hitler's own propagandised version of today's 'war against terrorism' - in his case, against Jews, Poles, Communists and other groups claimed by him to be a threat to Germany's national security, but in reality used as whipping posts to justify territorial expansion of the Reich) hardly noticed what had really been going on until it was too late.

But then, like some of the most destructive political leaders of our own time, their leader claimed that God was on his side and even the Churches were forced to submit.

'Gott Mit Uns'.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

Today Resistance Is Not Impossible - Yet

Click Here For May Day World Wide Protest Details

Propaganda 'Mit Uns'

"It was a weapon of mass destruction, a warning that we all needed to be 'vigilant and alert'. Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it was presented as the final proof that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qa'ida. Anyone wanting to exploit the politics of fear could scarcely conjure up anything more potent than the news that a suspected terrorist cell had been making ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known to man, in a north London flat. But there was no ricin - a fact suppressed for more than two years. There was no terrorist cell, just one deluded and dangerous man who killed a police officer during a bungled immigration raid....   Last week at the Old Bailey, the Algerian was convicted and sentenced to 17 years for 'conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by the use of poisons and/or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury'. Four other alleged co-conspirators were acquitted, and charges against four lesser figures, whose trial was due to start tomorrow, were dropped. Yet the authorities remained undaunted. Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner in charge of anti-terrorism, said a 'real and deadly threat' had been averted, adding that it would be hard to overestimate 'the fear and disruption this plot could have caused across the country'. His chief, Sir Ian Blair, said it supported the argument for compulsory identity cards, echoing the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. Mr Clarke's immediate predecessor, David Blunkett, claimed that the case showed the need for more anti-terrorism laws... A terrorism trial which was spun from start to finish, abetted by many senior elements of the security establishment and much hysterical coverage in the media, is still being manipulated, regardless of the evidence in court. The 'ricin plot' was used before the Iraq war by Tony Blair as evidence of the danger from weapons of mass destruction, and by Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, before the UN Security Council as proof that Iraq was aiding al-Qa'ida terrorism. Linked to an equally illusory 'poison gas' threat to the London Underground, it was kept alive throughout a series of genuine attacks in places such as Istanbul and Madrid as a reminder that Britain too was a target.... Far from being an al-Qa'ida mastermind dispatched by Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants to destroy the British way of life, Bourgass emerges as an embittered loner who alarmed even other members of the marginal world he inhabited, one of illegal immigrants whose petty criminality was constrained by their poverty and poor English.... Four of the five main alleged conspirators were cleared last week, and the jury refused to convict Bourgass, the acknowledged owner of the incriminating bedsit lab, of the most serious charge of all: conspiracy to commit acts of Islamist terrorism by killing innocent civilians. But in January 2003 Britain and the US were also on the verge of war on Iraq, and the facts of the case were soon subordinated to political necessity. Even if ricin had been produced - and expert evidence at the Old Bailey was that the 'recipes' Bourgass had were all but useless - it is not by any description a weapon of mass destruction. Quite the opposite: it is effective only as a means of individual assassination, as demonstrated by the Bulgarian secret service, which used ricin to kill the dissident Georgi Markov on the streets of London in 1978....  But as we now know, there was no ricin in any case. Professor Alistair Hay, one of Britain's foremost authorities on toxins, said Bourgass's attempts to construct toxic weapons from his small supplies of ingredients and ramshackle 'laboratory' were 'incredibly amateurish and unlikely to succeed'. He was scathing about Meguerba's allegations that ricin would be smeared on door handles. Ricin, he said, had to be injected straight into a victim to be a reliable weapon. Swallowing ricin could kill, but was a thousand times less effective. Simply touching crudely made ricin was even less likely to kill. His expert report was so damning that the prosecution dropped Meguerba's claims.... More sinister, however, was the expert's discovery when he looked through the analysis of the seized material by the Porton Down chemical weapons laboratories in Wiltshire. On 7 January 2003 - the same day that two cabinet ministers claimed ricin had been found in north London - Porton scientists had realised there was no ricin there at all. Their first results at the flat had been a 'false positive'. What happened to that profoundly important discovery is still the subject of intense controversy. Porton officials were unable to tell Professor Hay when they told the police or Home Office. The Old Bailey heard claims that an overly cautious Porton Down official had delayed passing the information on. Defence lawyers, however, believe ministers knew at an early stage that the claimed ricin find was wrong. Gareth Peirce, the human rights lawyer who acted for three of the acquitted men, claims that as ministers built up the fear of terrorist attack on Britain and prepared the public for the invasion of Iraq, the Government twice allowed largely unfounded scare stories to dominate the headlines - the ricin conspiracy and the alleged 'poison gas' attack on the London Underground. The alleged plot to target the Tube first broke with a sensational story in The Sunday Times, which claimed in November 2002 that the intelligence services and police had thwarted a major al-Qa'ida plot to gas the Underground. The paper claimed the alleged plotters would appear in court the next day, leading to a frenzy of press reports citing MI5 and police sources claiming a 'terrorist attack had been nipped in the bud'. In fact, no such plot had been discovered. Three men were actually charged with using false passports. Two have since pleaded guilty, under ordinary criminal laws, to passport offences. One was an alleged al-Qa'ida ringleader, Rabah Kadre, the then librarian at Finsbury Park Mosque, where many of the alleged ricin conspirators worshipped. According to Ms Peirce, the ricin plot was similarly exploited for political ends.... Ms Peirce is scathing about the political use made of the ricin 'plot', saying: 'We had a find in a London flat of something that could be poison, with a number of lists or recipes. A very early announcement was made that ricin had been found. From then on, people became aware of a poison they'd never heard of before, and that then created a major alarm - something on which the Prime Minister felt impelled to speak that very evening. 'Yet within 48 hours, Porton Down knew that ricin had not been found. If enormous public concern and fear has been generated, then the responsibility clearly of the Government is to reassure people that it was in fact a false alarm, that no poisons were found. But at no stage has any public correction been made.'..."
Ricin: The plot that never was
Independent, 17 April 2005

"It can now be revealed that months earlier, and behind the scenes, the government had seen its claims that the group was a major terrorist cell with the capability of launching a ricin terror attack begin to disintegrate. Using the notes, written by Bourgass, found at the Wood Green address, scientists at Porton Down attempted to replicate the ricin recipe. They found that by copying his recipe the active ricin naturally contained in castor beans would actually be destroyed. It was also found that the amount of castor beans mentioned in Bourgass’s recipes – five grams – would constitute one lethal dose, but only if injected. It would not be sufficient to kill if eaten. In a disclosure that appears at odds with the belief that Bourgass’s plan to smear door handles with ricin was a major terror threat, Paul Rice, group leader for medicine and toxicology at Porton Down, wrote in a document revealed at the trial that there was 'no reliable scientific evidence … that suggests ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin'.... In another astonishing revelation, while the government and police allowed speculation to persist that ricin had been found in the flat and was to be used in a terror attack, it has emerged that on January 7 – the day of Veness’s statement – Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at Porton Down, completed lab tests which confirmed that the ricin finding was a false positive. He wrote: 'Subsequent confirmatory tests on the material from the pestle and mortar did not detect the presence of ricin. It is my opinion therefore that toxins are not detectable in the pestle and mortar.' Despite this, on February 3, 2003, Tony Blair told the Commons: 'Iraq is not the only country posing a risk in respect of WMDs. Over the past few weeks, we have seen powerful evidence of the continuing terrorist threats; the suspected ricin plot in London and Manchester …'.....Following the trial on Wednesday, Labour and the police have been keen to paint the conviction of Bourgass as a triumph. In a statement, the Metropolitan Police’s anti- terror chief Peter Clarke said a 'real and deadly threat' had been averted. 'The impact on the public, if he [Bourgass] had succeeded in what he wanted to do, is incalculable.' David Blunkett, who was home secretary at the time of the arrests, said: 'We were very close indeed to disaster. We were actually much calmer and more reassuring to the public than we felt ourselves.' However, Tony Blair and anti-terror police are now facing uncomfortable questions about whether the conviction of Bourgass really represents a major success for the so-called war on terror. As the facts emerge, a growing number of people believe that the case reveals how a criminal investigation was exploited for political purposes by the UK and US governments in order to make their case for war against Iraq. Some also suggest that the case was used to justify the argument for tighter restrictions on civil liberties, such as the introduction of control orders or ID cards.”
A pestle and mortar and castor beans ... tools of a terror plot or an excuse for the government to ramp up public paranoia?
Sunday Herald, 17 April 2005

Listen To Gareth Pierce Being Interviewed On The BBC Today Programme - Click Here

Guardian - The ricin ring that never was - Click Here
Washington Post - London ricin: finding called false positive - Click Here
Guardian - Doubts grow over al-Qaida link in ricin plot - Click Here
Guardian - Home Office says sorry to suspects for ricin blunder - Click Here

Overview
Anglo-American Election Fraud

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday... The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate. The report also called into question new voting machine technologies. 'All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,' the report concludes."
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, 1 April 2005

The Inauguration Of President George W Bush 20 January 2005

'President Bush gives a thumbs-up to Chief Justice William Rehnquist' Photo - TIME magazine, European Print Edition p 38/39, 31 January 2005 'Celebration And Dissent' How Did This Unpopular President Win The US Election? "President Bush's approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president since World War II at this point in his second term, the Gallup Organization reported today. 'All other presidents who were re-elected to a second term had approval ratings well above 50% in the March following their re-election,' Gallup reported.  Bush's current rating is 45%. The next lowest was Reagan with 56% in March 1985." Gallup: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Ever for 2nd-Term Prez at this Point Editor And Publisher, 5 April 2005 "Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II. Bush's erosion of support among independents in particular has helped bring his overall approval rating down to 45 percent. Fort-nine percent disapprove of his performance...True enough, Bush's numbers weren't all that high to begin with. In the last Gallup poll before the election, he was at 48 percent approval to 47 percent disapproval -- yet he still won ...." Bush's Poll Numbers Worst on Record Washington Post, 11 April 2005 "The next time one of your smartypants liberal friends says to you, `Well, he didn't have a mandate,' you tell him of this delicious fact: This president got a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate for president since 1964." Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist Rove to GOP: Don't Grow 'Tired or Timid' Associated Press, 17 February 2005 "Although 45 percent of Americans polled say they support George Bush, five months ago candidate George Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. In five months, then, millions of Americans have moved from voting for George Bush to not supporting him. Who are these Americans?" Americans Increasingly Reject Bush Intervention Magazine, 10 April 2005 "The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance." Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005 "In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can be hacked. This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.... The hack ..... was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person. This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for their investigation." Investigation Update (Submitted to members of the House Judiciary Committee on Mar. 4 and Mar. 8.) Blackbox Voting, 8 March 2005

Hey George, Relax, We All Know That Systematic Party-Sponsored Vote Fraud Doesn't Happen In Anglo-American Controled Democracies - Now Does It?
No Tony, It Sure Doesn't

'It Can't Happen Here' - UK

"Investigations by The Times into all-postal voting in June found ..... A national Labour Party document [which] urged activists to set up bogus ballot boxes outside traditional polling stations in all-postal-voting areas."
Test case on future of postal voting examines organised electoral fraud
London Times, 10 December 2004

".....the Tories will tomorrow attempt to capitalise on Labour embarrassment over fraud claims by issuing a four-point action plan for ballot reform. In addition to introducing independent observers, they would scrap Labour's plans for all-postal ballots and electronic voting..... The police are currently investigating allegations of postal vote fraud during the 2004 local and European elections in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Surrey."
Poll monitors to combat election fraud
The Observer, 3 April 2005

"The Labour Party deliberately rigged elections to Britain’s biggest local council because it feared losing power in the face of public opposition to the Iraq war, a judge decided yesterday. The postal voting system introduced by Tony Blair’s Government without any safeguards against cheating was responsible for 'electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic', he said.  Opposition parties immediately called for urgent changes such as individual registration to 'restore confidence in the electoral system'.... The Labour Party machine in Birmingham was condemned for trying to stop the trial and pre-judge the result."
Up to 3,000 people had ballot papers stolen
London Times, 5 April 2005

"The postal voting system was condemned as wide open to fraud by the second judge in a week as a former Labour councillor was jailed yesterday for stealing 233 people’s votes....... Judge Peter Openshaw said that he had no precedent for deciding punishment because election fraud on such a scale had been unknown in Britain for 100 years.  Judge Openshaw, the Recorder of Preston, identified what he called obvious vulnerabilities in the system just days after an election commissioner in Birmingham blamed postal voting for fraud that would 'disgrace a banana republic'. The Director of Public Prosecutions is studying the commissioner’s report on six Birmingham Labour councillors who stole 3,000 votes. Yesterday’s case prompted calls for emergency measures to reform postal voting. Both cases this week have exposed Labour Party involvent in fraud.... "
Councillor jailed for vote fraud
London Times, 9 April 2005

"..... the [British] government remains keen on electronic voting and is aiming at 'an e-enabled election some time after 2006'. Will this raise turnout or simply increase the risk of fraud? Several pilots have been held. In 2003, six local authorities electronically counted ballot papers where votes had also been cast electronically. Surprisingly, there has been no manual checking of the e-counting results. However, a full-blown test run of e-voting has been carried out elsewhere, with very instructive results. It shows that e-voting is neither secure nor tamper-proof, and allegations are surfacing that it may have affected the result. This dry run was the recent US presidential election. ... According to Harris, a manipulation technique she found in Diebold's AccuVote central vote tabulator is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set within its software. 'By entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes,' she has said. And she has demonstrated this live on television. Her conclusion is: 'You can easily edit the election.'.... We must be extremely cautious of the surge towards electronic voting. Before importing US voting systems into Britain, any software secrets in the machine technology must be made transparent. Software must be properly certified, and there must be paper trails."
Michael Meacher - Former Blair Minister
Political machinations
The government is keen to deploy e-voting despite evidence of ballot rigging
Guardian, 2 February 2005

'It Can't Happen Here' - IRAQ

"The scene is now set for a prolonged power struggle between the US and the Shia majority. Having been deprived for more than 500 years of the opportunity to govern Iraq, the Shias, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are clearly now determined to exert their influence.In the face of this risk of a clerical-backed alliance of Shia Islamists in collaboration with Iran, the US has not been idle. Time magazine (27 September 2004) reported before the elections on a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favoured by Washington. It reported US officials as saying that the idea was to help such candidates, but 'not necessarily' to go so far as to rig the elections. In the event, the United Iraqi Alliance of mainly Shia Islamist parties won only 48 per cent of the total vote, well below their share of the population. Interestingly, Reuters (13 February) reported a few hours before the election results were officially announced that 'the United Iraqi Alliance said today it had been told by Iraq's Electoral Commission that it had won around 60 per cent of the vote in the country's election'. This was later confirmed by the former US chief Unscom weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who announced to a packed meeting in Washington state on 19 February that the United Iraqi Alliance actually gained 56 per cent of the vote, and that 'an official involved in the manipulation was the source'. The significance of this voting manoeuvre is revealed in a Washington Post report (14 February): 'A senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 per cent vote won by the Shia slate deprives it of an outright majority. 'If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation'."
Michael Meacher: America is usurping the democratic will in Iraq
Independent, 5 April 2005

"Well-placed sources in Iraq who were in a position to know have told me that the actual Shi'a vote was 56 percent. American intervention, in the form of a 'secret vote count' conducted behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny, produced the Feb. 14 result. The lowering of the Shi'a vote re-engineered the post-election political landscape in Iraq dramatically. The goal of the U.S., in doing this, is either to guarantee the adoption of the U.S.-drafted interim constitution, or make sure that there are not enough votes to adopt any Shi'a re-write. If the U.S.-drafted Iraqi constitution prevails, the Bush administration would be comfortable with the secular nature of any Iraqi government it produces. If it fails, then the Bush administration would much rather continue to occupy Iraq under the current U.S.-written laws, than allow for the creation of a pro-Iranian theocracy. In any event, the Shi'a stand to lose. Whether this re-engineering will succeed in the long run has yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that many senior Shi'a know the real results that occurred on Jan. 30, and will not walk away from what they believe is their rightful destiny when it comes to governing of Iraq: a Shi'a controlled state, operating in accordance with Shar'ia law."
Scott Ritter - Hijacking Democracy in Iraq
AlterNet, 23 March 2005

'It Can't Happen Here' - US

"After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many more terminals are on the way. Unforunately, the machines have 'a fatal disadvantage,' says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who’s sponsoring legislation on the issue. 'They’re unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded.' After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices—but there’s no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job. It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can’t be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold’s source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. 'Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,' he says.... Suspicions run even higher when people learn that some of those in charge of voting technology are themselves partisan. Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fund-raiser for the Bush re-election campaign who recently wrote to contributors that he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.'”
Black Box Voting Blues
Newsweek, 3 November 2004

"Democracy rests on the public accepting the results of elections. But why should they? In general, trustworthiness stems from accountability. The ability to independently check the performance of a person, institution, or system allows errors to be caught and corrected, and, more importantly, deters errors. Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polling place there is no way anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended. This system lacks accountability. David Dill is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the author of a 'Resolution on Electronic Voting' advocating that every voting system should have a voter-verifiable audit trail. In this talk he discusses some principles, the basic technical issues with electronic voting, and some of the controversy surrounding the topic. A panel discussion by a group of experts follows the talk. This is the inaugural event in Rice Univerity's Technology, Society and Public Policy Lecture Series."
The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems
Rice University Webcast Archive, 25 February 2005

"On the substance, this bill - the subject of so much concern - falls for short of fixing what is wrong with our democracy....Will it help the inner-city voter in Franklin County, Ohio who waited ten hours in the pouring rain, while suburban voters in that county had no appreciable wait times?  What will this bill do to correct the problems that occurred in the most recent presidential election?..... I'm afraid it will do nothing to offer an explanation for the numerous machines in Mahoning County that recorded Kerry votes for Bush; the improper purging that took place in Cuyhaoga County; the machine tampering that occurred in Hocking County; or the 99% turnout that took place in Miami County."
Rep. John Conyers, on Bill HR 841
US House of Representatives, 3 March 2005

"It was a spectacular irony - a Republican senator using the word 'fraud' about the presidential election. More spectacular still, he was visiting his condemnation of apparent election manipulation on the incumbent party. And beyond all that, he and others based their conclusions largely on the incredible disparity between the last exit polls and the vote count itself.  Of course, Indiana’s Richard Lugar was talking about the presidential election in the Ukraine. But in so doing, he underscored that once again, the exit polls appear to have fulfilled the time-honored international tradition of the canary in the mine shaft.  If only we could have used them in that way here..... And [exit polls], along with the voting irregularities so thoroughly chronicled on the net (and still just seeping into the mainstream media), created an atmosphere that [national pollster John] Zogby thinks requires broad remedy: 'I think it's in the interests of the nation that we study what happened in this election and widen that, let's study what happened with the exit polls, and let's come out with a definitive conclusions by a blue ribbon panel to restore the legitimacy of this election.' Zogby thinks he knows the steps to take to do that. The first is for those who are raising questions, to keep doing so. 'I can reassure them they’re not crazy for asking. It’s not just those who are far out, it is indeed many respectable, responsible people.' The pollster says he’s heard from thousands of them, asking him to get involved in their various causes and investigations, so many he can’t answer them all. But he used Countdown as his mass e-mail reply. 'I’ll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it’s in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls.' Zogby called for the proverbial blue-ribbon commission into the voting irregularities, and the full release of the exit polling data.... Zogby says he’s at peace with his own Election Night forecast - made not with the Mitofsky or Edison exit polling, but with his own polls. He saw Florida and Ohio both 'trending' towards Kerry, and producing a triple-digit victory for the Democrat..... it was mildly encouraging to see some focus given to this entire topic Tuesday night by my old CNN cohort Aaron Brown. A carefully-worded segment included a laundry list of the problems we’ve been reporting on Countdown for the last three weeks, and compared them to 'the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubbell telescope.'  Brown referenced the UC Berkeley study on the prospect of 130,000 phantom votes in Florida (though he didn’t mention its conclusion that all of them went to President Bush), and even had about fifteen seconds of Blackbox’s Bev Harris and her slog through the computer printout records in Florida. Such as they are."
Keith Olbermann
MSNBC, 24 November 2004

"National pollster John Zogby, with a mixed record of predicting past elections, Tuesday afternoon went out on a limb and projected that Sen. John Kerry would defeat President Bush in the 2004 election. Zogby released his Election Day polling results shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday showing Kerry with 311 electoral votes to Bush's 213. Two-hundred seventy electoral votes are necessary to win the presidency. Zogby said Nevada and Colorado were too close to call. Republican operatives at Bush's planned victory party in Washington dismissed the numbers as inflated in Kerry's favor. Zogby had Kerry winning nearly all of the battleground states, including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Massachusetts senator had big leads in Iowa and Wisconsin, according to Zogby's polls. Earlier in the day, RealClearPolitics.com issued its average of various polls and showed that Bush was leading Kerry in the Electoral College vote, 227 to 203, with seven states too close to call. Those seven states were Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and New Mexico".
CNSNews, 2 November 2004
(Saved text - article web link no longer traceable)

"Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country, even while e-vote watchdogs prepared to file suits challenging the results derived from the controversial machines..... Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.... Many of the problems with electronic voting — whether accidental or intentional — may not be known until well after Tuesday, if at all. Most of the ATM-style machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. The organization recommended that voters choosing to use touchscreen voting methods be sure to double-check the summary screen to confirm that their votes had been properly registered. BlackBoxVoting.org, the site organized by e-voting activist Bev Harris, announced early Wednesday that it plans to conduct what the site describes as the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history, requesting internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships using electronic voting machines".
E-voting irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure
USA Today, 3 November 2004

Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005

Statistical Analysis Showing High Difference Between
Official Election Results And Exit Polls Where Votes
Counted By Machine In 2004 Presidential Election
(compared with low difference where paper ballots used)
WPE = 'Within Precinct Error'
Table 7: Median WPE by voting equipment
Main Report


Graph from Summary Report
Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005

Latest 2004 US Presidential Election Result Research From Academic Consortium

Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
http://exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

March 31, 2005

Press Contact: Bruce O'Dell, USCountVotes, Vice President bruce@uscountvotes.org

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky1 consortium. Their national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance.

These estimates range from 1 in 959,000 to 1 in 1,2403. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance. Edison/Mitofsky disavowed the results of their own poll, saying that the data cannot be construed as evidence that the official vote count was corrupted, and hypothesized that Kerry voters were more amenable to completing the poll questionnaire than Bush voters.

However, Edison/Mitofsky's own exit poll data does not support their theory that a higher exit poll response rate by Kerry voters accounted for the discrepancies between the exit polls and the presidential election results. Using Edison/Mitofsky’s data tables we demonstrate that the “reluctant Bush responder” hypothesis is implausible because it is inconsistent with the combination of high response rates and high discrepancy rates among the precincts with the highest percentage for Bush.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:

· voting machine shortages
· ballots counted and recounted in secret
· lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots
· touch-screen machines that registered “Bush” when voters pressed “Kerry”
· precincts in which there were more votes recorded than registered voters
· precincts in which the reported participation rate was less than 10%
· high rates of “spoiled” ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded
· a sworn affidavit by a Florida computer programmer who claims he was hired to develop a voting program with a “back door” mechanism to undetectably alter
vote tallies

Did Edison/Mitofsky's January 19th report support their assertion that Bush voters were more reluctant to participate in exit poll surveys than Kerry voters? Did their analysis confirm the “Reluctant Bush Responder” hypothesis?.....