Poll Screw-Ups: Snow, 'Invisible Ink' and Missing Ballots

California Run Out of Ballots, Snow Snarls Illinois and 20 in Chicago Fooled By 'Invisible Ink' Stylus

By MARCUS BARAM

Feb. 5, 2008 —

It wasn't quite a "hanging chad" moment, but Oprah Winfrey stepped in early today to resolve one of the first voting glitches of Super Tuesday.

When Rachel Waymire got to her Chicago precinct this morning to vote, she was told that she wouldn't be able vote because only one of five election judges was present.

When Winfrey, who happened to be at the next-door precinct, heard about the problem, the talk show queen and Barack Obama supporter told Waymire she would stay with her until she was allowed to cast her ballot.

"She just kind of stood there and then as soon as I got to vote she left and she said, 'I'll call you later to make sure that you voted.' And probably about an hour later I was sitting at my desk and she called my cell phone," Waymire told Chicago's talk station WLS, adding that she voted for Obama.

That was just one of several mishaps and polling flukes on the most busy primary day in history.

One of the more unusual blunders, consistent with Chicago's notorious history of political hijinks, involved 20 voters on the city's North Side who were convinced by a precinct worker that a stylus for marking electronic touch screens was actually a pen with "invisible ink" to be used for marking paper ballots.

The ballots were rejected by the machine and election officials had to scramble to find the voters who cast bad ballots, eventually getting 10 of them to vote with real ink.

A spokesman for the city's Board of Elections said there was no skullduggery involved and confirmed that one of the 20 voters was the wife of an election judge.

Meanwhile, on the city's West Side, police were called to a polling place after a fight broke out between two female election judges, leaving one injured and one in police custody.

The weather played havoc with voting results in Lake County, Ill., on Tuesday afternoon, as a snowstorm may have impacted telephone lines and delaying the transmission of vote totals. As a result, poll workers had to hand-deliver ballots to the county clerk's office.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, had to wait for almost an hour to vote this morning because voting machines didn't work at his polling place, the Hoboken Fire Department Engine Company No. 2. About a dozen voters were turned away and it was unclear what caused the problem.

Because another polling site in Jersey City opened almost an hour late this morning, a lawyer for Obama's campaign was in Hudson County Superior Court arguing that the site should be kept open until 8:50 p.m. tonight, the Jersey Journal reported, but was turned down by a judge.

In John McCain's home state of Arizona, there were scattered reports of irregularities that included registered voters' names missing from registration lists, identification problems and changes in polling locations that confused voters who were not provided an opportunity to vote by provisional ballot.

After more than six polling sites in New Mexico ran out of ballots due to heavy voter turnout, new ballots had to be frantically printed and sent via couriers to those locations, according to the state's Democratic Party.

Five precincts in California's Santa Clara County and about a dozen precincts in Alameda County also ran out of ballots, reportedly due to large numbers of independent voters requesting Democratic ballots. The Santa Clara County registrar was urging voters to bring sample ballots or wait in line to use the few electronic voting machines meant to serve the disabled and affected precincts in Alameda County were kept open until 9:00 p.m.

There were problems with voting machines including temporary glitches in St. Louis and Chicago and two-hour waits at some polling stations in Fulton County, Ga. In Los Angeles, voting machines weren't delivered to several polling locations.

Even in Beverly Hills, Calif., there were glitches and a shortage of poll workers forced some voters to cast provisional ballots. "There's so much frustration in this country, so to feel like I'm a disenfranchised voter in Beverly Hills is ridiculous," Kristen Bell, an Obama supporter, told the Los Angeles Times.

And in Wisconsin, Texas and Virginia, some clueless voters showed up at polling locations even though primaries weren't taking place in those states today.

But there weren't any large-scale failures like the "hanging chad" nightmare that resulted in the historic Florida recount of 2000.

Since then, dozens of states have spent millions of dollars to purchase electronic voting machines and to put in places ways to verify votes. But was all that money worth it?

Problems have persisted in almost every federal election since 2000. Just two weeks ago, Republican primary voters in Horry County, S.C., were turned away from some precincts where paperless electronic machines weren't working.

As voters head to the polls today on an election day with the most delegates at stake and a tightening Democratic contest, some are concerned that there could be chaos at the polling booths with malfunctioning machines and disputed results.

Six states, including New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Delaware and Tennessee, are "considered at high risk for having election results affected by machine malfunction or tampering," according to a report by Common Cause and the Verified Voting Foundation, nonprofit groups committed to accountable politics.

Those states made the list because they don't have safeguards in place such as requiring machines to produce paper ballots or records and requiring random postelection audits of the machines, according to the voting foundation's president, Pamela Smith.

"If a situation arises where there is a question about the results, what do you do?" said Smith. "The states that we've listed at high risk  the voting systems may work, it may not work. But there's no way to prove it's accurate. Things can and do go wrong."

Smith says that many states and counties rushed to buy electronic voting machines without regarding the need for a way to verify votes if the machine malfunctioned.

"What happened was people moved too quickly to all electronic and didn't realize that they had to have a way to check for accuracy," she said.

Although most electronic voting machines have worked well, there have been some well-publicized debacles.

In the November 2006 election in Sarasota County, Fla., where the race was decided by 369 votes, more than 17,000 ballots showed no votes cast, a difference that had the potential to change the results.

Election officials in the six states considered "high-risk" in the report insist that their machines work well and that they don't anticipate any problems.

New York, which still uses old-fashioned lever machines, will provide emergency paper ballots and technicians if the machines break down, according to Lee Daglian, spokesman for the state board of elections.

"I haven't heard from anyone in any county about any problems with the machines," he said, adding that the report's authors "shouldn't be concerned because historically, they work pretty well."

New Jersey was set to switch to paper-based systems by Jan. 1, 2008, but the deadline was extended to June. 'We are confident that every voter's vote will count," said David Wald, spokesman for the state attorney general. "The machines are polished and dusted and ready to go."

In Arkansas, most of the state's 75 counties have a voter-verified paper trail in the machines, but three counties haven't made the change. The state also uses Ivotronic touch screens, the type that didn't work in Sarasota County in 2006.

"They've been tested in five statewide elections with good success and we're not concerned," said a spokesperson for the Arkansas secretary of state. "It's worked for us so far and we're not about to overhaul it in this election year."

In Delaware, the state's electronic voting machines store the results in three places: on a paper tape in the machine, on the machine itself and on a cartridge, all of which allow ballot image retention, says a spokesman for the state's commissioner of elections.

Georgia has one of the strictest levels of requirement for the testing of machines, according to Matt Carruthers, a spokesman for the secretary of state. "In addition to testing procedures, on Election Day, monitors are deployed throughout the state and we have technical support specialists available to respond."

A coordinator for the Tennessee Division of Elections did not return calls seeking comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

U.S. recession could be worse than recent downturns

Joanne Morrison
Reuters
Wednesday February 6, 2008

The chances of the United States avoiding a recession appear to be growing dimmer by the day, and any contraction in the economy will likely last longer and be more severe than other downturns in the past 20 years.

Recent reports have shown the housing market slump and rising defaults in the mortgage market are now taking their toll on job growth and on the manufacturing and services sector.

But heavy consumer debt, a growing federal budget gap, and rising prices could make any recession worse than Americans have experienced over the past two decades.

"If we do go into recession, it's going to be more severe and long-lasting than the last one," said Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard professor and member of the private-sector panel that dates U.S. recessions.

The nation's last two recessions, in 1990-1991 and 2001, each lasted for just eight months.

But the two downturns that ended in 1975 and 1982, when economic conditions bore some similarities to today, each lasted 16 months, making them the longest recessions since the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the accepted arbiter of U.S. recessions.

The U.S. economy entered the recessions of 1975 and 1982 saddled with huge government budget deficits from spending on social programs and the Vietnam war, and was suffering double-digit consumer price inflation.

Frankel said members of NBER's business-cycle dating panel have been in contact with each other over the prospect of a recession through e-mails, but it would likely take months, or perhaps even more than a year, for the panel to determine whether the economy had turned down.

Full article here.

DHS official moots Real ID rules for buying cold medicine

Dan Goodin
The Register
Wednesday February 6, 2008

A senior US Department of Homeland Security official has floated the idea of requiring citizens to produce federally compliant identification before purchasing some over-the-counter medicines.

"If you have a good ID ... you make it much harder for the meth labs to function in this country," DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker told an audience last month at the Heritage Foundation. Cold medicines like Sudafed have long been used in the production of methamphetamine. Over the past year or so, pharmacies have been required to track buyers of drugs that contain pseudoephedrine.

His comment came five days after the agency released final rules implementing the REAL ID Act of 2005 that made no mention of such requirements. It mandates the establishment uniform standards and procedures that must be met before state-issued licenses can be accepted as identification for official purposes.

Beyond boarding airplanes and entering federal buildings or nuclear facilities, there are no other official purposes spelled out in the regulations. And that's just what concerns people at the Center for Democracy and Technology. They say Baker's statement underscores "mission creep," in which the scope and purpose of the REAL ID Act gradually expands over time.

"Baker's suggested mission creep pushes the REAL ID program farther down the slippery slope toward a true national ID card," CDT blogger Greg Burnett wrote here. He says requiring people to produce a federally approved ID to buy cold medicine is a good example of the "significant ramifications" attached to the act.

So far, 17 states have formally opposed REAL ID, which takes effect on May 11. Residents of those states will be subject to additional searches and other inconveniences when flying and may be barred from entering federal buildings and nuclear plants.

Baker's statement belying the official DHS position on REAL ID isn't the first time the agency has made confusing remarks about the legal requirements surrounding identification. According to travel writer Edward Hasbrouck, DHS officials continue to plant the misunderstanding that residents from states which don't comply with REAL ID requirements won't get on planes. They will, Hasbrouck asserts here. In fact, he says, airlines are prevented by law from requiring any kind of ID.

Nonetheless, the DHS website continues to claim a photo ID is needed to pass through security checkpoints. Hasbrouck has his suspicions about the motives for such statements.

"The most obvious explanation is that they want to use the implied (but legally and factually empty) threat of denial of air travel to intimidate states into 'voluntarily' complying with the Real-ID Act and its rules," he writes.

Nelson says he doubts official explanation of terrorist attacks

Associated Press - February 5, 2008 7:25 PM ET

AUSTIN (AP) - Texas icon Willie Nelson said on a nationally syndicated radio show this week that he questions the official story of the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.

Nelson was asked by talk show host Alex Jones if he questions the official story.

Nelson said quote: "I saw those towers fall and I've seen an implosion in Las Vegas, there's too much similarities between the two. And I saw the building fall that didn't get hit by nothing. So, how naive are we, you know, what do they think we'll go for?"

Nelson's publicist would not comment on the remarks.

Jones is an Austin-based talk show host on the Genesis Communications Network. He is sometimes described as a "conspiracy theorist."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Will Congress Vote "Yes" to More Bush Spying?

Ari Melber
The Nation
Wednesday February 6, 2008

This week Americans face a profound choice -- and it has nothing to do with the presidential election.

The Senate is about to vote on legislation, favored by President Bush, to strip American courts of their authority to supervise massive government surveillance. The Senate intelligence bill sidelines the U.S. intelligence court, established by a 1978 law, and grants Bush new spying powers. Under the proposal, the Administration merely needs to "certify" it will not abuse them.

Of course, Bush already has abused his spying powers. He conceded in 2005 that the Administration conducted massive surveillance without the warrants required by law. A judge resigned in protest; Bush's former attorney general, his deputy attorney general and the FBI director also threatened to resign; and one federal court found the warrantless spying illegal.

Yet the Senate's legislation fails to confront that history. Instead, Democratic leaders are poised to validate Bush's illegal surveillance -- giving even more ground than the Republican Congress ever did. Worse, the current bill would cover up Bush's abuse by granting retroactive amnesty to telecommunications companies accused of breaking the law, even if the people involved acted knowingly or maliciously.

The retroactive amnesty proposal is so extreme, in fact, it is hard to fathom how Congress, as a law-making body, can advance this blatantly lawless approach. This amnesty makes presidential pardons look tough. While pardons save convicted felons from jail, a controversial tack, they still require a full public trial. Retroactive amnesty just squashes entire cases. No investigation. No judicial fact-finding. And the public gets no information about these alleged crimes at the highest levels of American government and business. What if the spying was abused to distort elections or pad corporate profits? The bill would keep the public in the dark.

The intelligence bill is not just unpalatable; it is indefensible on the facts. That may be why the Senate is pushing the bill now, during the distractions of the busiest week in presidential politics. (The ACLU, MoveOn and liberal bloggers have also been fighting the bill, causing some delays and fortifying efforts by Senators Feingold and Dodd to amend it this week.) The Administration has also savaged the facts to bolster a weak hand. Bush officials have mischaracterized the bill, impugned the security credentials of their opponents and threatened to veto a temporary version so they could blame any ensuing intelligence problems on Democrats.

Bush's bad faith nearly derailed everything, because his veto threat enraged the bill's chief sponsor, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Bush ally on intelligence issues. Last week, in a showdown on the Senate floor, the normally mild-mannered Rockefeller even accused the White House of "political terrorism." Then Bush buckled, signing a temporary measure despite his veto threats, while reiterating his demand for amnesty in a final bill. Jacob Sullum, a conservative writer for the libertarian Reason magazine, described it as "the latest in a series of Bush administration reversals and self-contradictions" on intelligence legislation. "If the president and his men can't even get their public story about warrantless surveillance straight, how can we trust them to secretly exercise the unilateral powers they are seeking?" he asked.

We can't. And it's not just Bush, who has little time to exercise these unfettered powers, anyway. Spying abuse has bipartisan roots, from Democratic administrations infiltrating the anti-war movement to Nixon taping everyone from John Kerry to his own aides.

Surveillance is only more crucial and ubiquitous now, in an asymmetric war with elusive non-state actors. The core issue is whether Congress will ensure that our government conducts surveillance the American way, with oversight by American courts and public accountability for anyone who would exploit security concerns for illicit ends.

Proponents of warrantless surveillance like to say that "you have no problem if you have nothing to hide." Put aside the unconstitutional premise about individual rights, though, and that dare works in the other direction. Congress can confront Bush with a similar imperative: court oversight is no problem for you or the telecommunication companies, as long as you have nothing to hide.

'Complications put Iran war on ice'

Press TV
Wednesday February 6, 2008

A prominent security think tank says there is now a low probability of a US military attack on Iran over the country's nuclear program.

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) announced on Tuesday that there is no short-term prospect of a US strike on Iran, despite the fact that Tehran remains intent on continuing its nuclear activities.

IISS director-general and chief executive Doctor John Chipman said that the US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded Tehran is not running a nuclear weapons program, 'changed the dynamics of efforts to curb Iran's dual-use nuclear program'.

"Tehran is moving ahead with a new generation of more efficient centrifuges," Chipman continued.

This is while the UN nuclear watchdog says Iran's nuclear program is in line with power generation for its nation.

He added that Russia's delivery of 82 tons of uranium fuel, which will be used in Iran's nuclear power plant in Bushehr, 'removed another form of leverage over Iran'.

Iran says as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and therefore refuses to halt its uranium enrichment program.

Vaccine Companies Investigated for Manslaughter

Mercola.com
Wednesday February 6, 2008

French authorities have opened a formal investigation into two managers from drugs groups GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur. Judge Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy also opened an investigation for manslaughter against Sanofi Pasteur MSD, a joint venture between Sanofi Aventis and Merck.

The investigations follow allegations that the companies did not fully disclose side effects from an anti-hepatitis B drug used in a vaccination campaign in the 1990’s.

From 1994 to 1998, almost two thirds of the French population, and almost all newborns, were vaccinated against hepatitis B. The campaign was suspended after concerns arose about side effects.

Some 30 plaintiffs have launched a civil action, including the families of five people who died after receiving vaccinations.

Sources:
Reuters February 1, 2008

Dozens of U.S. banks will fail by 2010: analyst

Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

Published: Friday, February 01, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dozens of U.S. banks will fail in the next two years as losses from soured loans mount and regulators crack down on lenders that take too much risk, especially in real estate and construction, an analyst said.

The surge would follow a placid 3-1/2 year period in which just four banks collapsed, all in the last year, RBC Capital Markets analyst Gerard Cassidy said in a Friday interview.

Between 50 and 150 U.S. banks -- as many as one in 57 -- could fail by early 2010, mostly those with no more than a couple of billion dollars of assets, Cassidy said. That rate of failure would be the highest in at least 15 years, or since the winding down of the savings-and-loan debacle.

"The initial round of failures will come from smaller banks with limited access to capital and overexposure to commercial real estate," Cassidy said.

"Could banks with $75 billion or $100 billion of assets fail? That's hard to say, but it depends on the severity of the economic downturn and the real estate decline," he added.

Banks are under pressure as a slowing economy, the housing crunch, weak job growth and rising energy costs make it harder for individuals and businesses to pay their bills.

Compounding the problem has been the seizing up of capital markets that has led to more than $130 billion of write-downs worldwide, including at lenders such as Citigroup Inc , Bank of America Corp and Washington Mutual Inc .

On Wednesday, Standard & Poor's said financial industry losses linked to mortgages may reach more than $265 billion.

Analyst Tanya Azarchs expects the pain to spread to regional banks, and especially "some of the smaller players that have yet to feel the full extent" of the credit crunch.

Cassidy said: "The regulatory focus is now acutely on commercial real estate. The problems are centered around construction loans in residential housing. Home prices and sales are declining. This leaves builders unable to carry the debt they took on because they can't sell their homes."

RESERVES MAY GROW, MERGERS MAY NOT

There are 8,553 banking institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Of these, 7,285 are commercial banks, 1,257 are thrifts and 11 are U.S. branches of foreign banks.

Twenty-six banks have failed since the last U.S. recession began in March 2001, the FDIC said.

The latest came last week, when Douglass National Bank of Kansas City, Missouri collapsed. Liberty Bank & Trust Co of New Orleans took over its $53.8 million of deposits. FDIC-insured institutions have about $8.19 trillion of deposits overall.

Cassidy expects the bank failure rate to be the worst since at least 1993, when 50 banks collapsed. That followed more than 2,000 failures in the previous decade, according to FDIC data.

Still, that pales in comparison with the more than 9,000 bank failures from 1930-1933, during the Great Depression, Federal Reserve data show.

A top U.S. bank regulator, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, said on Thursday that his office was prepared to intervene if banks with large real estate exposure maintained unreasonably low reserves for bad loans.

A tough credit and regulatory environment may make it hard for struggling banks to find suitors, Cassidy said.

On Thursday, Midwest banks Integra Bank Corp and Peoples Community Bancorp Inc called off their merger.

Integra Chief Executive Mike Vea lamented that the housing crunch "fundamentally changed the attitudes of the stock market, industry experts and regulators toward mergers."

Cassidy said: "Sellers are not going to receive the premiums they think they deserve. Merger activity is going to slow until the down leg in the credit cycle is past."

(Editing by Gary Hill)© Reuters 2008

Video: Alex Jones Interviews Willie Nelson on 9/11

YouTube
February 5, 2008

FBI wants palm prints, eye scans, tattoo mapping

Kelli Arena and Carol Cratty
CNN
Tuesday February 5, 2008

The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people's physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

But it's an issue that raises major privacy concerns -- what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.

The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information -- from palm prints to eye scans.

Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's Biometric Services section chief, said adding to the database is "important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in."

But it's unnerving to privacy experts.

"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project.

The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes. The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.

A lot will depend on how quickly technology is perfected, according to Thomas Bush, the FBI official in charge of the Clarksburg, West Virginia, facility where the FBI houses its current fingerprint database. Watch what the FBI hopes to gain »

"Fingerprints will still be the big player," Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told CNN.

But he added, "Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play."

First up, he said, are palm prints. The FBI has already begun collecting images and hopes to soon use these as an additional means of making identifications. Countries that are already using such images find 20 percent of their positive matches come from latent palm prints left at crime scenes, the FBI's Bush said.

The FBI has also started collecting mug shots and pictures of scars and tattoos. These images are being stored for now as the technology is fine-tuned. All of the FBI's biometric data is stored on computers 30-feet underground in the Clarksburg facility.

In addition, the FBI could soon start comparing people's eyes -- specifically the iris, or the colored part of an eye -- as part of its new biometrics program called Next Generation Identification.

Nearby, at West Virginia University's Center for Identification Technology Research, researchers are already testing some of these technologies that will ultimately be used by the FBI.

"The best increase in accuracy will come from fusing different biometrics together," said Bojan Cukic, the co-director of the center.

But while law enforcement officials are excited about the possibilities of these new technologies, privacy advocates are upset the FBI will be collecting so much personal information.

Full article here.

White House Opposes Surveillance... Of Its Own Surveillance Policy

Techdirt
Tuesday February 5, 2008

Since it was formed in 2004, on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been blasted by civil libertarians as a tool of the administration, more interested in whitewashing War on Terror�related privacy violations than serving as a genuine check on government intrusion. One of the board's five members even resigned in protest, citing among other things "the vast array of alphabet soup agencies and bureaucracies in the national security apparatus" that sought "to control and modify the Board's public utterances." So last year, Congress sought to give the board greater autonomy by moving it out from under the aegis of the White House and reconstituting itself as an independent boad within the executive branch. The response of the White House, Wired reports, has been to drag its feet in appointing a new board -- meaning there is no one on the board as of January 30th -- prompting bipartisan criticism from top members of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee.

The board's second annual report (pdf), released late last month, does not exactly inspire confidence in its assiduousness as a privacy watchdog -- even when staffed. After touting its excellent working relationship with the White House, it moves to a "nothing to see here" review of the post-9/11 use of the material witness statute (MWS) as a detention tool. Aside from one "terrible mistake," the report asserts the board "was not made aware of specific problems with the use of the MWS in the anti-terrorism context" and cites a claim by the Justice Department that "on only nine occasions since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has the MWS been used in terrorist-related investigations." That is hard to square with the findings of a joint report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, which found some 70 instances of 9/11-related detention, though the discrepancy may be explained by the frequent use of immigration violations as a pretext for detentions that were actually related to terror investigations. The board's analysis of the Protect America Act, passed last August, similarly reads like a compilation of White House talking points.

This should not be all that surprising given the composition of the old board, which consisted of such Republican stalwarts as President Bush's former solicitor general, Ted Olson. With debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act raging in the Senate, the White House appears less than eager to have a less-friendly set of eyes reviewing its surveillance policies.

Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest

George Washington's Blog
Tuesday February 5, 2008

We already knew that the 9/11 Commissioners had conflicts of interest. And we already knew that Philip Zelikow had huge conflicts of interest, which the new book The Commission explores.

But did you know that a 9/11 Commissioner recently said that all of the 9/11 Commission staff had a conflict of interest?

Specifically, 9/11 Commissioner and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman just said on NBC Nightly news:

�We purposely put together a staff that had � in a way - conflicts of interest" (3:48 into video)

He went on to say:

"All of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest" (4:09 into video)

This is important because many people have assumed that -- even if Zelikow and the Commissioners had conflicts of interest -- the staff would at least do a thorough and unbiased job in investigating what happened on 9/11. We now know this is not true.

Indeed, Lehman strongly implies that the Commission was purposely set up so that every single person involved would have a conflict of interest which would prevent them from conducting an honest investigation.

Lehman himself is a textbook example of conflict of interest. In 1998, 9/11 Commission executive director Zelikow published an article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled Catastrophic Terrorism: Imagining the Transformative Event. Some two years later, PNAC picked up the Zelikow language, saying that the campaign to convince the public to allow expanded use of U.S. military force around the world "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor". Lehman was a member of PNAC, and a signatory to PNAC's plea for "a new Pearl Harbor". See this video and this essay.

When taken with other facts undermining the Commission's credibility (and see this), Lehman's revelation should completely destroy the idea that there has been any real investigation into 9/11.

CIA shrugged off no-war reports

Press TV
Tuesday February 5, 2008

A key Iraqi nuclear scientist says he believed by telling the truth about Iraq's weapons, he was helping to stave off the invasion.

Saad Tawfiq, a key figure in Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear weapons program, said when he watched Colin Powell waving a vial of white powder and telling the UNSC on February 5, 2003, a story about Iraqi germ labs, he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP this week in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Tawfiq's sister got involved under pressure in one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam's Iraq, a program built up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

"We don't have the resources to make anything anymore. We don't even have enough spare parts for our conventional military. We can't even shoot down an airplane. We don't have anything left. If the sanctions are ever lifted, then Saddam is certain to restart the programs. But there is nothing now," Tawfiq told his sister.

And yet, although all 30 recruited Iraqi weapons scientists said the same thing, that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long been abandoned, the CIA ignored the results.

Then CIA national intelligence officer Paul R. Pillar said there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying.

But as Tawfiq laments five years later, "You don't have to destroy a country for that."

Three different versions of "suicide attack" in israel contradict each other

The Truth Will Set You Free
Tuesday February 5, 2008

Today, some poor Palestinian allegedly "blew himself up" in israel, "killing three israelis" and giving israel one more reason to bomb the shit out of Gaza.

Supposedly, he and his comrade, who was killed by israelis "before he could explode himself" crossed over from Gaza to Dimona - israel's 'Disney world for nukes'.

Only problem is - so far, I've seen three different versions of who's responsible for "the attack" and not one of them sounds credible.

1. From ADN Kronos International:Police officials said a suicide bomber targeted a busy shopping centre in the town in the Negev desert and blew himself up on Monday morning.

   But they said there appeared to be two attackers, although only one managed to detonate his explosives belt.

   A second bomber did not detonate his explosives belt and was subsequently killed by a police officer.

   Palestinian sources claim the bombers Raji al-Kilani and Iman al-Haydan entered Israel from the Gaza Strip.

   [btw, Iman is a woman's name - though both are referred to as men]

   Several militant factions have claimed responsibility for the attack and according to a spokesman of the al-Qassam Brigades "The attack is a response to the massacres perpetrated by Israel in Gaza," reported Palestinian news agency Maan.

   The militant group Islamic Jihad praised the attack and called it a blow against "Israeli occupation".

   Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said the attack was justified, and that "It shows the Palestinians can respond to the enemy and their crimes," reported Israeli daily Haaretz.

2. From AP at 8:23am: Palestinian militants say two suicide bombers who entered a southern Israeli town today came in through Egypt after Gaza militants blew up Egypt's border wall with the territory last month.

   1 of the attackers killed an Israeli woman. The other attacker was shot dead before he could detonate his explosives.

   Israeli officials have feared the possibility of bombers from Gaza entering through Egypt since the border wall was breached.

   [what a coincidence, they're worst fear came true]

   Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians moved freely between Gaza and Egypt's Sinai desert. Egypt managed to reseal the border yesterday.

   The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade first claimed today's bombers came from the West Bank, but now says that statement was a diversionary tactic. They say they didn't know initially if the second bomber was still alive and wanted to confuse Israelis. Once they confirmed the second bomber was dead, they said he was from Gaza.

3. From AP at 5:37am ET: "We heard a large explosion and people started to run. I saw pieces of flesh flying in the air," a witness identified only by her first name, Revital, told Army Radio.

   The Haaretz daily reported that the second attacker was shot dead before he could explode himself.

   Southern Israel has been on alert against militant attacks since the Gaza Strip's Islamic Hamas rulers breached the border with Egypt on Jan. 23. Egypt managed to reseal the border only on Sunday.

   The breach made Israel's Negev desert, where Dimona is located, more vulnerable to penetration by Palestinian militants who could enter through Egypt's Sinai desert. Dimona is about 40 miles northeast of the porous Egyptian border. Last week, Israel closed a number of popular hiking areas in the south for fear of militant attacks.

   There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Monday's attack.

   In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said he did not know whether his group was involved but that the attack was justified. He also rejected suggestions that the bombing would hurt Hamas' chances of reopening the border with Egypt.

So, let me get this straight - at first, no one claimed responsibility for the attack, then three different groups clamored to claim rights to this 'glorious operation.'

One of the groups then initially claimed that the attackers were from the West Bank "as a diversionary tactic" but then retracted that and admitted that he was from Gaza, ONLY after they were sure that he was dead (so, he couldn't deny it).

Perfect sense. Not.

Clearly, this "operation" was planned and executed by israelis in an attempt to demonstrate that any breach in Gaza's border subjects them to deadly attacks from the "hordes of Arab suicide bombers" that the wall holds back.

Moreover, it gives israelis a cart blanche to kill as many Palestinians as they please in Gaza.

Finally, some accounts say one israeli was killed, others say three were killed. Which is it?

I'll bet the answer is closer to ZERO.

In fact, I challenge anyone to present a bona fide image from a bona fide UNBIASED news source of any of the so-called israelis that were killed today in the "suicide attack."

As usual, israelis are lying.

Indeed, another score for zionists.

It's a truly terrifying paradox. In the name of freedom, Britain is becoming a police state

TOM BOWER
UK Daily Mail
Tuesday February 5, 2008

Successfully bugging Islamic terrorists ranks among the key weapons to defeat those secretly campaigning to destroy Britain's liberal civilisation.

Ever since suicide bombers caused 52 deaths on the London Underground in 2005, we have reluctantly accepted further encroachments on our liberties as a necessary evil.

Last week's prosecutions in Birmingham against extremists plotting to behead a Muslim soldier, as part of a campaign to wreck Britain's racial harmony, were possible only because listening devices had been planted inside the terrorists' homes.

The intelligence officers who masterminded that delicate operation deserve high praise.

But accolades turn rapidly to admonition when the line between intrusion to defend our civilisation and intolerable denial of our liberties is crossed.

That is why the news that MI5, the domestic intelligence service, and Scotland Yard had apparently mounted an eavesdropping operation against Sadiq Khan, a Muslim MP and government whip, is so alarming.

In defending British society, our guardians' vigilance appears to threaten the destruction of the very values we seek to protect.

Regardless of the financial wrongdoing by a handful of greedy politicians, Britain's 646 MPs are the ultimate guardians of our liberties.

Within the House of Commons, MPs are empowered to fearlessly expose corruption and oppression. Only their elected authority, threatening to shame ministers and public servants, protects Britain from dictatorship.

Rightly, our MPs jealously guard the rights and privileges afforded to their electorate since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

Hence, the suggestion that the State's police and intelligence services secretly investigated Sadiq Khan arouses justifiable fears that our increasingly authoritarian Government is adopting powers familiar to the Nazi and Stalinist tyrannies.

Yes, it is possible that Khan's visit to a suspected terrorist awaiting extradition to the U.S. might have provided pertinent information for the intelligence services.

Full article here.

Ahmadinejad tells West: Accept Israel’s ‘imminent collapse’

Haaretz
January 30, 2008

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on the West Wednesday to acknowledge Israel’s “imminent collapse.”

Speaking to a crowd on a visit to the southern port of Bushehr, where Iran’s first light-water nuclear power plant is being built by Russia, Ahmadinejad further incited his listeners to “stop supporting the Zionists, as [their] regime reached its final stage.”
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“Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later come to an end,” the Iranian president said in a televised speech.

He added, “What we have right now is the last chapter [of Israeli atrocities] which the Palestinians and regional nations will confront and eventually turn in Palestine’s favor.”

Iran does not acknowledge Israel and Ahmadinejad has in the past sparked international outcry by referring to the systematic murder of six million Jews in World War II as a “myth” and calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

Iran is currently also mediating in the crisis over the Gaza Strip, where Israel has imposed a blockade on border crossings into the coastal territory, barring the entry of supplies into the already impoverished area. Last week, Palestinian militants blew holes in the barrier separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt, prompting hundreds of thousands of Gazans to pour into Egypt in search of supplies.

Ahmadinejad also urged the Western powers to help build nuclear power plants in his country saying it will be too late if they do not decide to do so immediately.

“If you will not come, this nation will build nuclear plants based on its own resources and when you come some four years later it will reject your request and not then give you any opportunity,” he said.

“I am addressing leaders of two or three powers; do you remember I sent you message and told you to stop be stubborn? If you think that you can block the movement of Iranian nation, you are wrong,” the Iranian president continued.

Also on Wednesday Ahmad Fayyazbakhsh, the deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization told reporters the first Iranian-made light-water 360 megawatt nuclear power plant will go operational in 2016 in the southwestern Iranian town of Darkhovin.

The official also said that the Bushehr plant would go on test operation in October, though its precision instruments have yet to be delivered.

The United Nations Security Council has been trying to pressure Iran to freeze uranium enrichment, but it has repeatedly refused, and officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency have privately said Tehran is expanding the program.

The Security Council is considering a new draft resolution that calls for additional sanctions against Iran, including bans on travel. Two sets of sanctions have already been imposed on Iran for refusing to halt enrichment.

The five veto-wielding members of the council - the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia - along with Germany, agreed last week on the basic terms of the new resolution. Diplomats have said the full, 15-nation Security Council will likely approve it next month.

Iran insists its enrichment activities are intended only to produce fuel for nuclear reactors that would generate electricity, but the U.S. and others suspect Tehran’s real aim is to produce nuclear bombs.

A U.S. intelligence report released last month, however, concluded Tehran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and had not resumed it since.

Iranian officials have said they plan to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity through nuclear energy in the next two decades.

10-city home price drop a record

Reuters
January 29, 2008

Home prices in 10 major metropolitan areas fell a record 8.4 percent in the year through November, suggesting the housing slump is worsening, according to a Standard & Poor index released on Tuesday.

The decline in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index topped the 6.7 percent annual drop for October and was deeper than predicted by economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The consensus was for a 7.1 percent fall, Goldman economists said.

Home prices across big cities have now declined for 11 consecutive months and show little sign of bottoming, said economists, including Robert Shiller, a founder of the index and chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC. The decline in the index accelerated to 2.2 percent in November over October, from 1.4 percent in the previous month, S&P said.

The index “confirms our outlook that the housing shock is by no means over,” said Michelle Meyer, an economist at Lehman Brothers in New York. “Home prices are falling in response to weak demand, which is a function of buyer sentiment and tight credit conditions.”

Falling U.S. home prices in the past year have fueled rising delinquencies and foreclosures, with homeowners unable to get out of costly loans. Banks and investors, throttled by losses in risky mortgages, have sharply curtailed financing for all but the most credit-worthy borrowers.

A surprise cut in the Federal Reserve’s target interest rate last week and another probable one on Wednesday is one ray of hope for the housing market by pulling down most mortgage rates, economists said. The Fed, in cutting its federal funds rate by 0.75 percentage point, cited concerns of deteriorating financial markets and reduced credit for homeowners.

Rate cuts “could give housing a boost but I’m guessing they won’t be enough to stop a decline” in prices, Shiller said. “The best that we could hope for is a slower pace of declines.”

A broader but newer index of 20 cities recorded an annual decline of 7.7 percent in November, S&P said. Miami and San Diego led with annual declines of 15.1 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively.

Other double-digit year-over-year declines were in Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Tampa and Los Angeles.

Total declines in U.S. home prices will be at least 15 percent from the peak to the trough, Meyer said. The 10-city composite S&P/Case-Shiller index at 205.09 in November is down 9.4 percent from a high of 226.29 in June 2006.

Test To Track Traffic Using GPS Cell Phones

East Bay Business Times
February 1, 2008

Researchers at UC-Berkeley will join in a field test Feb. 8 to study how traffic flow can be monitored using data from driver’s GPS-enabled cell phones.

The researchers will look at the potential of using cell phone data instead of the road sensors currently used, while at the same time preserving phone users’ privacy.

The experiment, dubbed Mobile Century, will involve a fleet of 100 cars with drivers carrying Nokia cell phones. They will travel a loop along a 10-mile stretch of Interstate 880 between Hayward and Fremont.

The experiment is a joint project between researchers at the UC-Berkeley’s California Center for Innovative Transportation and the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto.

Tragicomic Tale of the 9/11 Report

By EVAN THOMAS New York Times

Published: February 4, 2008

Journalists like to talk about the back story, the story behind the story. The back story can be nothing more than vaguely sourced gossip traded among pundits and politicos before they go on talk shows. But sometimes the back story is the real, whole truth, a tale of conniving or official blundering that the headlines can only hint at. Journalists often conceal the whole truth because they need to protect their sources.

Philip Shenon, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, set out to get behind the scenes of the 9/11 Commission. The inside story of a government commission doesn’t sound very promising; most commission reports wind up unread on dusty shelves.

When the 9/11 Commission announced its findings in the summer of 2004, the response was by and large respectful. Reprinted as a book, “The 9/11 Commission Report” was an instant best seller, unusual for a document written by committee. But its popularity was owed mostly to a spare, riveting narrative of the shocking events on Sept. 11, 2001, not to its policy recommendations or revelations about official malfeasance. So why go over it all again?

Mr. Shenon is a skillful writer and storyteller as well as a dogged reporter. In “The Commission” he makes bureaucratic warfare exciting, largely because he has a keen grasp of human frailty and folly. He opens with a desperate, almost pathetic scene of Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, sneaking documents out of the National Archives.

Mr. Berger had actually been more attentive to the threat of Al Qaeda than most government officials, including his successors in the Bush administration, but he apparently feared that he and his boss would become scapegoats. “Beneath his gruff amiability,” Mr. Shenon writes of Mr. Berger, “there was deep insecurity that, even he admitted, bordered on paranoia.”

In a memorable scene Mr. Shenon depicts the widows of 9/11 victims, a group that called itself the Jersey Girls, meeting Henry A. Kissinger, President Bush’s choice to be chairman of the 9/11 Commission, in the posh offices of Mr. Kissinger’s international consulting firm in New York. When one of the Jersey Girls asks Mr. Kissinger if he has any clients named bin Laden, Mr. Kissinger spills his coffee and nearly falls off his sofa. “It’s my bad eye,” Mr. Kissinger explains, as the women rush to clean up the mess — “like good suburban moms,” Mr. Shenon says one widow recalls. The next morning Mr. Kissinger telephoned the White House to resign from the commission.

The black hat of Mr. Shenon’s story is the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow. Brilliant but abrasive and secretive, he is regarded by some commission staff members as a White House mole, compromised by his close ties to Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s national security adviser. The book’s portrait of Mr. Zelikow is harsh, but Mr. Shenon seems to have reached out to Mr. Zelikow to get both sides of the story. (Mr. Zelikow scoffs at charges of conflict and conspiracy made by Mr. Shenon’s sources.)

The official ineptitude uncovered by the commission is shocking. Dubbed “Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost clueless about the terrorist threat. “Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president,” Mr. Shenon writes. “Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.”

The C.I.A. has some inkling that Osama bin Laden is stirring to strike the United States, but for many crucial months fails to tell the F.B.I. that two terrorists (who later turned out to be 9/11 hijackers) are actually in the United States. The popular image of the C.I.A. as dashing and all-knowing is for the movies only. After much dickering with the White House, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the mild-mannered patrician who succeeded Mr. Kissinger as commission chairman, is allowed to read pre-9/11 copies of the President’s Daily Brief, the C.I.A.’s digest of its most important secrets. “He found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified,” Mr. Shenon writes. “There was almost nothing in them.”

Of the briefings, Mr. Kean said, “They were garbage,” adding, “There really was nothing there — nothing, nothing.”

The C.I.A. director George J. Tenet is depicted as evasive and exhausted, both from chasing Al Qaeda and trying too hard to please everyone he worked with. The F.B.I. bumbling verges on the tragicomic. Haunted by missed chances to stop the 9/11 hijackers, the F.B.I.’s acting director, Thomas J. Pickard, keeps a list of the bureau’s numerous mistakes. At least Mr. Pickard was bothered by his agency’s ineptitude.

Attorney General John Ashcroft appears more interested in protecting gun owners from government intrusion than in stopping terrorism, and dismissively tells Mr. Pickard that he doesn’t want to hear any more about threats of attacks.

Not wanting to point fingers and name names — and set off partisan wrangling among the commissioners — the 9/11 Commission shied away from holding anyone personally accountable. The commission ended up blaming structural flaws for the government’s failure to protect the nation and recommended appointing a national intelligence director to ride herd.

The nation now has such a director, but with weaker authority than what the commission proposed, and the position may turn out to be no more than another layer of bureaucracy. Ultimately, as Mr. Shenon shows, the failure at the highest levels of the United States government was human. That is the real back story of 9/11.

Evan Thomas is editor at large at Newsweek.

9/11 Commissioner: 'We had to go through Karl Rove'

Nick Langewis and David Edwards raw story
Published: Sunday February 3, 2008

Two recent segments delve into a new book that accuses the head of the ostensibly independent 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, of being beholden to the Bush Administration during his tenure.

The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, indicts Zelikow on his ties with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and his frequent contact with senior political adviser Karl Rove, during what was touted as an independent investigation into the events surrounding the 2001 World Trade Center attack. This seeming conflict of interest, the book says, led Commission staffers not to trust Zelikow.

"We found him to be very fair-minded," counters co-chair Lee Hamilton, "quite impartial, very rigorous in his searching out of the facts; and he certainly did not try to protect the Bush Administration, or to protect anybody else."

9/11 Commission member John Lehman goes on to tell MSNBC that it was impossible not to go through Karl Rove when documents such as presidential daily briefings were needed. Many Commission members, he says, pressed the White House to provide more information and lift restrictions on a regular basis.

"We had to go through Karl Rove, and through [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and the other most senior members," says Lehman. He indeed hoped that Zelikow was talking to Karl Rove, although he expressed disappointment that contact with the White House wasn't more frequent towards the beginning of the investigations.

On charges that a mass of NSA records on al-Qaeda went unreviewed by the Commission, Lehman says that nothing new would have come about as a result of obtaining that data besides more text to put into the final Commission report.

The Commission is due to be published on February 5.

The following video is from NBC's Nightly News and MSNBC's News Live, broadcast February 2 and 3, 2008.