|
Open Thread 05-117
Sorry, I am busy with some job related stuff, so there is no real post today and tomorrow.
But there are a few reads out there that you might want discuss here:
The End of News in U.S. media?
Is it a democracy if a leader uses the military for partisan attacks? And if people, who are officially proven to be innocent, are
kept in jail anyhow?
Now which was this empire that did throw people in into lion cages?
Also in a few days it’s the 60th anniversary of the start of the main Nuremberg Trial. Is there hope for another one?
You also may use this as an open thread.
Wronskian Realpolitik
Suspend your loathing for numerology for a brief moment.
There is a sub-class of functions of second-order ordinary
differential equations such that, when they are multiplied by
constants, that is, for csub1 a(x) , csub2 b(X) … csubn z(x),
if the sum of the constants equals zero, then the variables
can be called ‘dependent’. ‘Bi-polarity’ and ‘co-dependence’
are two sociological manifestations of the minimal equation,
for just two functions. When one function goes up, the other
goes negative to (im)balance. This is a Wronskian condition.
The business-sucks call this condition a ‘net sum zero’.
Much like Rome vers the Visigoths, or the Church of Rome
vers the Church of Constantinople, the Catholic Papacy
vers the King of England, Robber Barons vers Populists.
Much like the Left Blogistans vers the Neo-Deficistas.
Rather than plot their course against the stars, Left B’s have
a tendency, as they sail off away from the Land of Bushmania,
to suddenly veer on their course in a long elliptic, circling the
island of their discontent, and throwing animal bones, charms,
fetishes and curses at the despotic, scrooge natives of Neo.
The Neo’s are only too happy to indulge this strange phenom.
If the Left B’s were to keep on sailing, most of the island’s
population would eventually join them in some far off Tahiti
of the mind, an elyssian world of forested communes living
blissfully between the sun and the sea, each to their ability.
But the Left B’s, whether they admit it or not, are dependent
on the Neo’s for their weltzeit, their realpolitik. When the Neo’s
trot out a Wall of Steel on Syria, visions of Cambodia long past
swim in the Left B’s heads, and out they’ll trot Joan Baez for a
little folksing, a little schnapps and a little sponge cake. Oi!
This strange dependence isn’t lost on the Neo’s. They know,
for example, that for every Abu Ghraib and Niger Yellow Cake,
there’s a hundred ways to damp the rising fury of Blogistan down,
and to diffuse those angry crowds on the beach. “See,” they’ll say,
“Here come the Left B’s back again. Everything is as it should be.”
Not for nothing did Spiro call the Left B’s ‘effete liberals’.
Nothing is more dangerous than an insurrection which, once begun,
returns again and again, as a servile dog to it’s master’s compound,
to beg for a bone, and bark to be let back in by the roaring fire.
Free peoples don’t turn back from their quest, and don’t look back.
A Wronskian condition only occurs among sedentary co-dependents.
Ut tensio sic vis. (As the force, so the displacement). In fewer words:
the Neo’s are beating US like a drum. There is only one thing we have
that they must hold onto. Not our labor, they can offshore that. Not
our votes, they can buy those in the media. They need our T-A-X-E-S!
May your world be free from cell phones, billboards, cops and the blues.
In fewer words, *any* direction away from slavery is towards freedom.
And you don’t all have to hold hands and sing-a-long to get there.
Posted by: tante aime | Nov 16 2005 2:51 utc | 13
The so-called U.S. Marine that opportunistically appeared and then disappeared on these pages recently to launch a pre-emptive (albeit failed) damage limitation in advance of the breaking ‘Oh yes, we did use white phosphorus’ story was uninformed on so many levels that it is remarkable that posters, especially Pat, tried to give him any credibility whatsoever. A cursory examination of his claims set against what had already been admitted by the U.S. military would have convinced anyone, even Pat, that the poster was bogus.
Fallujans all left, only terrorists remained.
This lie, and lie is is, nothing else can describe it, is contradicted by the eye witness testimonies of U.S. military personnel and journalists who actually saw the tens of thousands of civilians who remained trapped in Fallujah. It is a lie that can be set against the crocodile tears of U.S. military personnel who conceded to journalists, who subequently reported the facts, that, yes, U.S. soldiers gunned down surrendering families waving white flags trying to leave scenes of carnage and horror, events which seem to have stimulated the sudden flurry of ‘terrorists used white flags as false surrenders’ reports, which screaming (unsubstantiated) headlines superceded the (substantiated) incidents of innocents, including children, being shot to death despite their pathetic white flags. The fake U.S. Marine, who surprisingly even Pat semed to find credible, balked at addressing the fact that males between the ages of 15-65 (or 16-55, depending on sources), were refused permission to leave Fallujah with their families and were sent back to face American military might, a war crime that flouts all decency and morality as well as the Geneva Conventions that forbid the turning back of civilians trying to flee the scene of any conflict. I have no intention of laboring on this post with links, I think anyone who wishes to learn the truth need only Google for the words of a senior U.S. military officer responsible for the massacre at Fallujah to read of his boasts that ‘preventing all males leaving was key to the success of the mission’ (i.e. attaining a massive body count of slaughtered Arab males who could be posthumously awarded the appellation ‘terrorist’. Even the formerly useful Christian Science Monitor’s journalist-gone-U.S. military hack should have alerted careful readers to something of what was taking place at the time with his references to ‘unarmed sleeper cells’ in Fallujah, such ‘cells’ of course comprising unarmed, trapped civilians who also received, both in death and in advance of it as a justification for their slaughter, the appellation ‘terrorist’. Add to the admissions of U.S. military personnel and journalists the eye witness accounts and statements from that other presence in Fallujah, the civilians themselves, add the stark and horrifying photographs of dead women, children, babies, men murdered in their beds et cetera, and spend only minutes Googling to learn of these things, the incontrovertible facts of these things, and the fake U.S. Marine, who strangely Pat wishes we had taken seriously, is immediately apparent as someone who is not speaking with any authority whatsoever about Fallujah. Ditto with regard to his lies about ROE, as U.S. military spokespersons, journalists and subsequent post-massacre accounts of events all contain confirmation of ‘fire free’ zones, of orders being given to shoot on sight any males ‘or hostile persons’ appearing on the streets (the Arab use of robes permitted the slaughter of women too, as any apparent women could have been men in disguise, see?). These are not allegations from me, they are facts, widely and massively reported and disseminated by U.S. military officers, journalists and American soldiers who took part in the massacre.
The media was heavily controlled by the U.S. military as the killing was taking place, indeed some uppity raghead journalists were assaulted and detained during the slaughter as their accounts did not match the spin to which the murders of so many people – armed and unarmed – was subject. Even so press accounts of the time carried factual statements about the ROE that were obtained from the U.S. military and which are totally at odds with the lying posts of the fake U.S. Marine that among others Pat, of all people, found to be ‘credible’.
Let’s be even more ‘illuminating’ – let’s move on to the technicalities of the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. Doubtless not every reader or poster here is familiar with the use of explosives but some may well be. White phosphorus, used to illuminate is fired into the air to burst and flare for anything from three to five minutes, one shell providing providing enough illumination to light up an area approximately the size of a massive football stadium. Even the non-explosives experts among you will understand that the shells do not ‘flare’ upon leaving the muzzles of the artillery firing them, but are time-fused so that a particular altitude can be reached before the shell explodes. The flaring is so bright as to render absolutely useless the sophisticated night vision goggles with which the U.S. military is equipped. In other words, a heavy dose of white phosphorus, even used as illumination, would blind U.S. soldiers relying on night vision goggles to both observe and to defend themselves from attacks.
How then would white phosphorus shells be of any use when fired into trenches or buildings to burn and demoralize those alleged to be within? In an unaltered state the answer is precisely zero as the time delay on the fuses would give ample time for the occupants to flee. Yes, even ragheads wouldn’t take long to work out the horrific nature of these shells and once exposed to them it wouldn’t have taken long before their ‘efficacy’ was rendered null and void. Except, the shells used at Fallujah were not ‘ordinary’ shells, but shells whose fuses had been specially modified to burst far earlier than was usual. Surprisingly, the fake U.S. Marine, who claimed to have been associated with artillery support, the same fake poster who Pat, surprisingly, thought we should have been having a debate with that discounted his being a serial liar, surprisingly this bogus artilleryman seemed to be blissfully unaware of the high level decisions that must have been taken to modify the fuses on white phosphorus shells all the better to incinerate the men, women and children who were to be the targets of these chemical weapons. The bogus U.S. Marine we may discount as a pathetic troll, but surely Pat, of all people, could have addressed the process whereby battlefield ammunition that is ordinarily intended to be fired to specific altitudes to provide illumination, undergoes deliberate modification to ensure that it explodes almost on impact? Surely the decision making process that underlies the use of chemical weapons against civilians in this way is not the preserve of a few innovative grunts? The conversion of shells to burn anyone and anything within a wide radius and gas anyone who wasn’t burned, such handiwork is not the bright idea of a handful of N.C.O.s and grunts who never got to mess around in the chemistry lab at high school, is it? Using such shells as weapons, and blinding your own soldiers’ night vision equipment in the process thus rendering them vulnerable, this wouldn’t be done unless you were reasonably sure that there could be no response from your ‘enemy’, would it? And the actual, physical modification of the shells, that would have been the work of more than two men and a small boy, wouldn’t it?
Personally, I get sick and tired of trolls trying to promote the discredited lies of last year in order to justify the mass murder of men, women and children in a city where 35,000 houses were destroyed. I get sick and tired of the lie that claims that civilians had been evacuated when it is a fact that tens of thousands of innocents were trapped in Fallujah because they were too old, sick, young or ill-equipped to leave it. I get sick and tired of reading the lie that men and youths were allowed to leave Fallujah when the U.S. military is on record as having boasted that they were prevented from leaving and that this was a good thing. I get sick and tired of reading sick and tiring people arguing that because the U.S. military ordered Iraqis to get out of their own homes those who did not or could not or who were prevented from doing so somehow deserved being roasted to death.
More sickening than any troll, though, is someone who ought to know better trying to minimize the horror of the massacre of Fallujah and playing semantic games with the words ‘chemical’ and ‘illumination’. Behind such mental cowardice lie the screams and death gasps of incinerated men, women, children and babies.
Pat, for instance, might prefer us to take on a troll than honestly examine the conduct of U.S. Marines who roped dead bodies to their vehicles and drove them through the streets of Fallujah, who sprayed the streets with shells and bullets and killed anyone who moved on them, who played ‘Team America, World Police’ over loudspeakers on their vehicles as they gleefully butchered their way through district after district, burning, killing, shooting prisoners and injured people, all under the cover of a lying press operation that many people, Pat, for instance, still seem to have an unswerving loyalty towards. Being distracted by, or encouraging others to be distracted by, trolls is no way to get to the heart of the vile behavior of the U.S. military and knee jerk expressions of loyalty ‘to the troops’ are not really what those murderous bastards deserve by way of consideration. An examination of the decision making process that saw U.S. officers ordering the modification of ordnance to make it a worthy weapon with which to commit war crimes is surely a more useful exercise than the nauseating defense of the indefensible that we have seen here.
Posted by: Spit | Nov 16 2005 15:08 utc | 26
The Free Press
Tue Nov 15 2005
Departments
Election Issues
Has American Democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005’s referenda defeats?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
November 11, 2005
While debate still rages over Ohio’s stolen presidential election of 2004, the impossible outcomes of key 2005 referendum issues may have put an electronic nail through American democracy.
Once again, the Buckeye state has hosted an astonishing display of electronic manipulation that calls into question the sanctity of America’s right to vote, and to have those votes counted in this crucial swing state.
The controversy has been vastly enhanced due to the simultaneous installation of new electronic voting machines in nearly half the state’s 88 counties, machines the General Accountability Office has now confirmed could be easily hacked by a very small number of people.
Last year, the US presidency was decided here. This year, a bond issue and four hard-fought election reform propositions are in question.
Issue One on Ohio’s 2005 ballot was a controversial $2 billion “Third Frontier” proposition for state programs ostensibly meant to create jobs and promote high tech industry. Because some of the money may seem destined for stem cell research, Issue One was bitterly opposed by the Christian Right, which distributed leaflets against it.
The Issue was pushed by a Taft Administration wallowing in corruption. Governor Bob Taft recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanors stemming from golf outings he took with Tom Noe, the infamous Toledo coin dealer who has taken $4 million or more from the state. Taft entrusted Noe with some $50 million in investments for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, from which some $12 million is now missing. Noe has been charged with federal money laundering violations on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Taft’s public approval ratings in Ohio are currently around 15%.
Despite public fears the bond issue could become a glorified GOP slush fund, Issue One was supported by organized labor. A poll run on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday, November 6, showed Issue One passing with 53% of the vote. Official tallies showed Issue One passing with 54% of the vote.
The polling used by the Dispatch had wrapped up the Thursday before the Tuesday election. Its precision on Issue One was consistent with the Dispatch’s historic polling abilities, which have been uncannily accurate for decades. This poll was based on 1872 registered Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.5 percentage points and a 95% confidence interval. The Issue One outcome would appear to confirm the Dispatch polling operation as the state’s gold standard.
But Issues 2-5 are another story.
The Dispatch’s Sunday headline showed “3 issues on way to passage.” The headline referred to Issues One, Two and Three. As mentioned, the poll was dead-on accurate for Issue One.
Issues Two-Five were meant to reform Ohio’s electoral process, which has been under intense fire since 2004. The issues were very heavily contested. They were backed by Reform Ohio Now, a well-funded bi-partisan statewide effort meant to bring some semblance of reliability back to the state’s vote count. Many of the state’s best-known moderate public figures from both sides of the aisle were prominent in the effort. Their effort came largely in response to the stolen 2004 presidential vote count that gave George W. Bush a second term and led to U.S. history’s first Congressional challenge to the seating of a state’s delegation to the Electoral College.
Issue Two was designed to make it easier for Ohioans to vote early, by mail or in person. By election day, much of what it proposed was already put into law by the state legislature. Like Issue One, it was opposed by the Christian Right. But it had broad support from a wide range of Ohio citizen groups. In a conversation the day before the vote, Bill Todd, a primary official spokesperson for the opposition to Issues Two through Five, told attorney Cliff Arnebeck that he believed Issues Two and Three would pass.
The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided, an even broader margin than that predicted for Issue One.
But on November 8, the official vote count showed Issue Two going down to defeat by the astonishing margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor. To say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility is to understate the case. For the official vote count to square with the pre-vote Dispatch poll, support for the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with virtually all the undecideds apparently going into the “no” column.
The numbers on Issue Three are even less likely.
Issue Three involved campaign finance reform. In a lame duck session at the end of 2004, Ohio’s Republican legislature raised the limits for individual donations to $10,000 per candidate per person for anyone over the age of six. Thus a family of four could donate $40,000 to a single candidate. The law also opened the door for direct campaign donations from corporations, something banned by federal law since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.
The GOP measure sparked howls of public outrage. Though again opposed by the Christian Right, Issue Three drew an extremely broad range of support from moderate bi-partisan citizen groups and newspapers throughout the state. The Sunday Dispatch poll showed it winning in a landslide, with 61% in favor and just 25% opposed.
Tuesday’s official results showed Issue Three going down to defeat in perhaps the most astonishing reversal in Ohio history, claiming just 33% of the vote, with 67% opposed. For this to have happened, Issue Three’s polled support had to drop 28 points, again with an apparent 100% opposition from the previously undecideds.
The reversals on both Issues Two and Three were statistically staggering, to say the least.
The outcomes on Issue Four and Five were slightly less dramatic. Issue Four meant to end gerrymandering by establishing a non-partisan commission to set Congressional and legislative districts. The Dispatch poll showed it with 31% support, 45% opposition, and 25% undecided. Issue Four’s final margin of defeat was 30% in favor to 70% against, placing virtually all undecideds in the “no” column.
Issue Five meant to take administration of Ohio’s elections away from the Secretary of State, giving control to a nine-member non-partisan commission. Issue Five was prompted by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s administration of the 2004 presidential vote, particularly in light of his role as co-chair of Ohio’s Bush-Cheney campaign. The Dispatch poll showed a virtual toss-up, at 41% yes, 43% no and 16% undecided. The official result gave Issue Five just 30% of the vote, with allegedly 70% opposed.
But the Sunday Dispatch also carried another headline: “44 counties will break in new voting machines.” Forty-one of those counties “will be using new electronic touch screens from Diebold Election System,” the Dispatch added.
Diebold’s controversial CEO Walden O’Dell, a major GOP donor, made national headlines in 2003 with a fundraising letter pledging to deliver Ohio’s 2004 electoral votes to Bush.
Every vote in Ohio 2004 was cast or counted on an electronic device. About 15%—some 800,000 votes—were cast on electronic touchscreen machines with no paper trail. The number was about seven times higher than Bush’s official 118,775-vote margin of victory. Nearly all the rest of the votes were cast on punch cards or scantron ballots counted by opti-scan devices—some of them made by Diebold—then tallied at central computer stations in each of Ohio’s 88 counties.
According to a recent General Accountability Office report, all such technologies are easily hacked. Vote skimming and tipping are readily available to those who would manipulate the vote. Vote switching could be especially easy for those with access to networks by which many of the computers are linked. Such machines and networks, said the GAO, had widespread problems with “security and reliability.” Among them were “weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management and vague or incomplete voting system standards, among other issues.”
With the 2005 expansion of paperless touch-screen machines into 41 more Ohio counties, this year’s election was more vulnerable than ever to centralized manipulation. The outcomes on Issues 2-5 would indicate just that.
The new touchscreen machines were brought in by Blackwell, who had vowed to take the state to an entirely e-based voting regime.
As in 2004, there were instances of chaos. In inner city, heavily Democratic precincts in Montgomery County, the Dayton Daily News reported: “Vote count goes on all night: Errors, unfamiliarity with computerized voting at heart of problem.” Among other things, 186 memory cards from the e-voting machines went missing, prompting election workers in some cases to search for them with flashlights before all were allegedly found.
In Tom Noe’s Lucas County, Election Director Jill Kelly explained that her staff could not complete the vote count for 13.5 hours because poll workers “were not adequately trained to run the new machines.”
But none of the on-the-ground glitches can begin to explain the impossible numbers surrounding the alleged defeat of Issues Two through Five. The Dispatch polling has long been a source of public pride for the powerful, conservative newspaper, which endorsed Bush in 2004.
The Dispatch was somehow dead accurate on Issue One, and then staggeringly wrong on Issues Two through Five. Sadly, this impossible inconsistency between Ohio’s most prestigious polling operation and these final official referendum vote counts have drawn virtually no public scrutiny.
Though there were glitches, this year’s voting lacked the massive irregularities and open manipulations that poisoned Ohio 2004. The only major difference would appear to be the new installation of touchscreen machines in those additional 41 counties.
And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling—dead accurate for Issue One—was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count.
If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.
And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.
Updated November 13, 2005
—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION AND IS RIGGING 2008, available at http://www.freepress.org/ and http://www.harveywasserman.com/, and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, available from The New Press in spring, 2006.
Posted by: brodix | Nov 17 2005 3:07 utc | 45
tony lagouranis, the u.s. army interrogator that amy interviewed the other day on democracy now, said a lot of things about his experience in iraq that are key to understanding what is going on over there
I was interrogating at the detention facility at Forward Operating Base, CALSU. I was getting prisoners that were arrested by Force Recon marines, and they — every time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys
. . .
I was believing the intelligence reports that came in with the prisoner. I believed the detainee units, but later it became clear to me that they weren’t — they were picking up just farmers, you know, like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel.
. . .
I did more than 300 interrogations in Iraq, and I’m guessing like 20 people, I got any like real intel out of
. . .
how many people did we get intel out of in Guantanamo? You know, a small handful, and in Abu Ghraib also. I didn’t work there for that long, but many of my friends did they worked there all of 2004, and they told me, they got nothing. They got no intel out of that place.
. . .
you know, we were trained to do interrogations according to the Geneva Conventions with enemy prisoners of war. And we trained using role players using a conventional army prisoner, and also a terrorist organization, and we treated both of them as though they were enemy prisoners of war. We weren’t allowed to cross any lines. So, I don’t know why I allowed the army to order me to go against my training, and against my better judgment and against my own moral judgment. But I did. I should have just said no.
at what point do otherwise reasonable people begin to draw the conclusion that so little intel has been gleaned from these actions b/c intel itself was never really the goal in the first place? the u.s. is engaged in a counterinsurgency war. these attrocities and massacres that so disgust & demoralize us are not the abberations of a program, but the program itself. it’s a continuation of the focus on counterinsurgency & ‘limited wars’ that kennedy accelerated & which rumsfeld has been pushing the military toward since 2000. iraq et al are both battlefield and laboratory.
a counterinsurgency must destroy the base of support for the insurgency, prevent them from accessing safe areas & establishing liberated areas, and try to overcome the ideological truths that mobilizes the insurgents w/ propaganda & psyops. thus we witness their use of mass civilian round ups, torture, and various intimidation tactics to attempt to dilute the sea in which the insurgents swim through, or as the counterinsurgents phrase it, ‘drain the swamp’. incarceration & detainment deprives the insurgency of recruits & cadres, breaking up underground political structures. torture & psychological damage render them ineffectual. we witness the collective punishment of falluja which serves both to level a safe base for insurgents & as an intimidation tactic to other communities of what lengths the occupiers will go to in order to punish those sympathetic to the insurgency aims. a mini-genocide in the middle of a larger terror campaign whose message goes not unnoticed by those targeted. (the timing was probably more oriented to the period of ramadan than it was to the u.s. presidential elections outcome ..after all, they already knew the outcome, right?) we witness a very coordinated series of psyops campaigns to tarnish world opinion of the insurgency revolution, attempting to cut off any external reinforcement at the head (literally…think back to the nick berg video).
this counterinsurgency war is just getting started. president blinky has ratcheted up the rhetoric over the past couple of month, laying a new foundation for the next several generations (he hopes), replacing the well-worn, but effective ‘int’l communist conspiracy’ w/ a broader ‘int’l radical islam conspiracy’. this will undoubtedly be their rationale for continued interventions, regime changes, and other clandestine operations. and should the bad cops (rethugs) find public tolerance of their behavior too much of a liability in our consumer-driven society, surely the good cops (demopublicans) and their liberal ‘stronger america’ mantra can be counted on to not venture too far from the agenda (and probably refine it as well!)
this is sounding bleak, i know, but really, if we’re still not able to call things as they really are wrt everything that the u.s.a., in particular, is standing for these days, what hope is there of any deviation from the path we are stumbling down? the winnebago elder reuben snake once said “if we don’t change directions, we’re going to end up where we’re headed.” where is that vision that will allow us to get through this? it’s always easy to react and analyze, compared to what is really needed – authentic moral authority, a vision that engenders mass support & cogent political awareness, an organizational plan for establishing viable institutional & systemic alternatives to the current system, the realization of self-managed communities, mobilization against hypocrisy/lies/state propaganda/state violence/state terrorism, and so on…
/rant
Posted by: b real | Nov 17 2005 5:02 utc | 49
|
