Voter Suppression?

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Democracy Now
October 22, 2008

link to mp3

Early Voting Sees Reports of Voter Intimidation, Machine Malfunctions

Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy. [includes rush transcript–partial]


Guest:

Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book is called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: Just days after reports that six early voters in at least two West Virginia counties claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican, a couple in Nashville, Tennessee reported similar problems with paperless voting machines. In West Virginia, one voter said, "I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.”

In Tennessee, a filmmaker couple also had difficulties casting their vote for the Democratic candidate, the Brad Blog reports. They had to hit the Obama button several times before it actually registered, and in one case it momentarily flipped from Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. Patricia Earnhardt said, “The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button.” The couple in Nashville were using machines made by the same company as those in the counties in West Virginia—by Election Systems and Software.

Meanwhile, there are reports of long lines at early voting sites in several other states, including some counties in Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.

Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic who’s been focused on voter problems and election fraud in this country. He’s a professor at New York University, author of several books. Most recently he edited Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.

Mark Crispin Miller now joins us in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your concerns right now, Mark?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, you’ve referred to a couple of them already. We now see a burst of vote flipping by machines, electronic voting machines in a couple of states. This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward to say, “I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up.” So, clearly, this was a systematic programming decision by the people in charge of the machines, which in that case and this one is the Republican Party. We’re also seeing systematic shortages of working voting machines in Democratic precincts only. This is also something that did not happen only in Ohio in 2004, but happened nationwide. That election was, in fact, stolen.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I know because there’s been an audit of the vote in eighteen counties of Ohio by a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips, who had his team literally scrutinize every single ballot that was warehoused in eighteen Ohio counties. They took over 30,000 digital photographs. This is not speculation, Amy. This is a meticulous, careful, specific and conclusive demonstration that John Kerry actually won some 200,000 votes in those eighteen counties only that were taken away from him. Bush’s official victory margin, you may recall, was about 118,000. So there is no question about it. Ohio was stolen.

AMY GOODMAN: When they—OK, so they have the pictures of all these—

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Pictures, there’s a CD with this book that you can—

AMY GOODMAN: But they have the pictures of the ballots.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Of the variously altered, mutilated ballots, yes. Ballots with stickers placed over the square that people had blacked in for Kerry/Edwards; somebody else blacks in Bush/Cheney. Thousands and thousands of ballots that were pre-marked before they were distributed, so that people would mark different boxes on them, and then they would be invalidated.

Even more chilling is the fact that after Phillips did his research, the boards of elections in fifty-five Ohio counties destroyed all or some of their ballots in defiance of a court order. So we have criminal behavior here of a kind of grand and systematic kind. But the point is—not to engage in what Sarah Palin calls finger-pointing backwards, the point here is to note that we’re dealing with a consistent pattern of subversive behavior by the Republican Party since 2000 and extending all the way up to the present. What we’re seeing now is an especially brazen and diverse range of dirty tricks and tactics that are being used both to suppress the vote and also to enable election fraud.

AMY GOODMAN: Ohio has been very much in the news this past week, not around the issue of voter suppression, but around the issue of fraudulent registration forms, the concern about them being handed in by the organization ACORN.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, the whole ACORN thing is a first-class propaganda drive. ACORN has done nothing wrong. ACORN has, however, been guilty of trying to register low-income citizens to vote. Because they’ve been in the sights of the Republican Party for several years now, they’ve always been extremely scrupulous about checking the registration forms that they garner from their volunteers.

You know, they pay people, basically, to register other voters. So, naturally, from time to time, some volunteer who wants the money will fill out a registration form, you know, with Mickey Mouse or the names of the Dallas Cowboys, something like that. Precisely because that is an ever-present possibility, the people at ACORN have always scrupulously checked the forms before submitting them.

And ten days ago, what they did was, in Las Vegas, their office in Las Vegas, they found a number of these suspicious forms, handed them over directly to the Secretary of State in Nevada, and his response was to turn around and say, “Aha! Here is evidence that you’re conspiring to commit voter fraud.” Now, that effort, that drive went from Nevada to Missouri to Ohio, and now we hear that the FBI is investigating ACORN.

The important point here, Amy, is that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Several studies have taken a close look at this and found that there really is no voter fraud of this kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films has put out a new short film about ACORN and the attacks against them. Let me play an excerpt.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

GOV. SARAH PALIN: John and I are calling on the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group and to do so immediately.

CARMEN ARIAS: These attacks on ACORN are part of a pattern of voter suppression that the GOP has been carrying on for a long time.

PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: The McCain campaign has now two camps. And one of them is already assuming that he’s lost, and he’s aiming for the post-election warfare in the Republican Party, and part of that is the ACORN strategy, which is trying to delegitimize the result in advance, if Obama were to win, by saying it was rigged by minority voters. That’s what this is about.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Someone here keeps yelling “ACORN, ACORN.” Now, let me just say to you, there are serious allegations of voter fraud in the battleground states across America. They must be investigated.

NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: Let’s look at North Carolina. We turned in 28,000 applications in North Carolina, and there are investigations into four of them right now. Over 95 percent of the cards we turned in were error-free. So we’re talking about an extremely small percentage of the overall 1.3 million cards collected. To suggest that this is some kind of widespread criminal conspiracy is just absurd.

MONTAGE OF NEWSCASTERS: ACORN. ACORN. ACORN—is a left-wing—radical—extremist community group.

CARMEN ARIAS: This is hardly the first time that these Rove-style tactics have been used to suppress low-income minorities.

NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2000.

GREG PALAST: Voters were being removed from the registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.

NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2004.

UNIDENTIFIED: Evidence has emerged that in the last presidential election the Republican Party organized efforts to suppress the votes of active-duty military, low-income and minority voters by challenging their registrations. The Republicans put in motion a plan to hold down the Democratic vote in key battleground states. Many are convinced that Republican officials broke the law.

NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: And they’re doing it again right now.

CARMEN ARIAS: Suppressing the low-income minority voters can swing an entire election. A handful of improperly filled-out voter registration cards cannot.


AMY GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a piece by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Professor Mark Crispin Miller?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The important point to get here is that the party that is itself engaging in disenfranchisement on a massive scale, the deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of arguably millions of Americans, is clouding the issue by accusing—essentially accusing its victims of doing the same thing. OK?

Voter fraud—I want to repeat this—is virtually nonexistent. There have been several academic studies of this notion of whether individuals actually stuffed ballot boxes or show up at polling places pretending to be somebody else. There’s actually not a single known case of any such type of voter fraud being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. And yet, that notion of voter fraud is used as the pretext for taking steps that do demonstrably result in tens of thousands of people being unable to vote, you see? It’s a really masterful strategy. And I only wish that the Democratic Party had all this time been aggressive in pointing out that the Republicans are the party engaged in disenfranchisement.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about a man named Stephen Spoonamore—

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —a prominent expert, supposedly, on computer fraud, and what he has to say. Stay with us.

Are You a REAL American?

Sarah Palin really has a lot of us wondering about who we really are. Come to think of it, what is a REAL American? According to the Constitution (which we don't pay much attention to anymore) it is anyone born in United States boundaries... That makes them a U.S. citizen. The things is, in the days of globalization, boundaries can come to mean many different things.

For one, if you are a citizen, but you don't look like Barbie with blonde hair, does that still make you an American? If you are blonde but wear a veil - are you still an American?

How about that murky area of those who arrived here right after they were born, but don't have the official title of "U.S. Citizen?" If you got here before you could walk, only speak English, watch football on TV every week and (unfortunately) buy food at McDonalds - maybe even attend a U.S. public college, does that make you an American?

I think about the Terminator Governor in California.... he wasn't born here, he has a heavy accent. But he's a guy! and he is a movie star! I guess that made it much easier for him to become a REAL American. He probably didn't have to depend on his grandmother to sponsor his green card.

If he was dark skinned and wore a turban, I don't think he would have passed the line to be considered an American as easily.



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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102449.html?nav=hcmodule

Palin Apologizes for 'Real America' Comments
Two Congressmen Face Backlash After Their Own Remarks Questioning Others' Patriotism

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2008; A04

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin apologized yesterday for implying that some parts of the country are more American than others, even as similar comments by two Republican congressmen were causing a backlash that threatened their chances for reelection.

In an interview on CNN, Palin said comments she made last week in North Carolina praising small towns as "the real America" and the "pro-America areas of this great nation" were not intended to suggest that other parts of the country are less patriotic or less American.

"If that's the way it has come across, I apologize," she told CNN's Drew Griffin.

In Minnesota, little-known Democrat Elwyn Tinklenberg announced yesterday that he has raised $1 million over the past four days for his House campaign, after Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann questioned Sen. Barack Obama's patriotism and recommended that the news media investigate whether other members of Congress are "pro-America" or "anti-America."

The money began flooding in from across the country after Bachmann made the comments in a seven-minute appearance on MSNBC's "Hardball" on Friday. "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?" she told host Chris Matthews.

The backlash from Bachmann's remarks gave Tinklenberg enough donations to quadruple his television advertising, prompted the nonpartisan Cook Political Report to flip its take on the race from "likely Republican" to "tossup" and inspired a Republican who lost to Bachmann in the party's primary to launch a write-in campaign.

Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, who is locked in a closely contested House race in North Carolina, has also been criticized after telling a crowd Saturday that "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God." Hayes initially denied making the remarks, but he was forced to acknowledge them after an audiotape of the speech surfaced.

"I genuinely did not recall making the statement and, after reading it, there is no doubt that it came out completely the wrong way," Hayes said in a statement released by his campaign. "I actually was trying to work to keep the crowd as respectful as possible, so this is definitely not what I intended."

Hayes had spoken at a campaign rally in Concord, N.C., where Sen. John McCain appeared. The 10-year congressman told the crowd he wanted to "make sure we don't say something stupid, make sure we don't say something we don't mean."

He then went on to praise Palin. "Folks, there's a great American," Hayes said. "Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God."

A spokesman for Hayes's challenger, Democrat Larry Kissell, said the Republican's remarks revealed how he truly feels. "Mr. Hayes often talks about being able to reach across the aisle and not be limited by party loyalty," said Thomas Thacker, Kissell's spokesman. "This indicates his hypocrisy knows no bounds."

Kissell is making his second run at Hayes after coming within 329 votes of unseating the veteran lawmaker in 2006. This time, Kissell is better funded, as the national Democratic Party is putting more than $1 million into his race.

The party is also spending heavily to help Tinklenberg unseat Bachmann, who was expected to cruise to victory before her comments.

"This is quite phenomenal," said John Wodele, a spokesman for Tinklenberg. "We were doing fine, we had a good campaign going. But this has got us in a position we never thought we'd be in."

More than 17,000 individual donors sent money to Tinklenberg in the days after Bachmann's television appearance.

"Almost instantly, the first contributions came in, before I could get on the phone and talk to the campaign manager and the candidate to think about what our reaction was going to be," Wodele said. "Then I just realized we didn't need to discuss it because it was going on its own. It was happening, and it was coming in from around the country."

Michelle Marston, Bachmann's spokeswoman, said the campaign has benefited from the controversy surrounding the congresswoman's "Hardball" appearance and it too has received additional contributions, though she would not say how much.

In fact, Mike Gula and Associates, a Capitol Hill fundraising and consulting firm, has sent an e-mail seeking donations to her campaign with the subject line "Bachmann HELP -- Under Fire."

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2nd Edition: Why can't a Muslim kid become president when he grows up?

The New York Times: Maureen Dowd's column has a phrase half way down the paper edition that says "Why can't a Muslim kid become president?" What an honor it is to be imitated.

See dreamacttexas post:

"Why can't a Muslim kid become president when he grows up?" October 19, 2008

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

October 22, 2008

New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Moved by a Crescent
By MAUREEN DOWD

Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”

But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.

His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his family back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a smiling young Iraqi boy.

His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go,” Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”

In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.

Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.

The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.

“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”

Powell is dismissive of those, like Rush Limbaugh, who say he made his endorsement based on race. And he’s offended by those who suggest that his appearance Sunday was an expiation for Iraq, speaking up strongly now about what he thinks the world needs because he failed to do so then.

Even though he watched W. in 2000 make the argument that his lack of foreign policy experience would be offset by the fact that he was surrounded by pros — Powell himself was one of the regents brought in to guide the bumptious Texas dauphin — Powell makes that same argument now for Obama.

“Experience is helpful,” he says, “but it is judgment that matters.”

Noriega's Senate Race

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/6069380.html

AUSTIN — Those who know Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega say he is the kind of guy who rarely quits thinking seriously about politics, good government and his commitment to duty — even when deer hunting.

"He's always on the move, always talking politics," said state Rep. John Davis, R-Houston, one of Noriega's closest friends, his deskmate in the Texas House and deer-hunting partner. "Whenever he comes over to the house to visit, I like to shut it down, but Rick's more intense than I am."

That same intensity is what drove Noriega to enter the uphill battle to unseat Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, his friends and colleagues said. Noriega himself once described the Senate race as "serious business"....

Tuition debate

The most notable piece of Noriega legislation was a 2001 measure he passed along with Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, to give in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants.

Because federal law requires Texas to give a secondary education to all children living in the state regardless of status, Noriega argued it makes financial sense for the Texas economy to make certain these children also have the opportunity to attend college. Conservatives have been trying to overturn this law since 2007.

State Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, said members of the military temporarily stationed in Texas have to pay out-of-state tuition to go to college here, as do foreign students in the country on a visa. He said it is unfair to give an advantage to youths who are in the country illegally.

"I'm very conservative, and Rick is very liberal," Berman said.

Noriega's family has lived in the United States for generations. He grew up in Houston in a home where English was his first language. Noriega learned Spanish later in life through relatives and school.Noriega joined the Army Reserves after the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. He attended the University of Houston on an ROTC scholarship and transferred to the National Guard after graduating. Noriega has two sons: Ricky, 11, is from his marriage to Melissa, and Alex, 24, is from a previous marriage.
Early in his political career, Noriega was an aide to state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, before becoming a lobbyist with Houston Industries Inc., which later divided to become Reliant Energy and CenterPoint. He moved from lobbying to economic development after winning his House seat in 1998...

Renewed sense of purpose

House colleagues describe Noriega as honest and honorable and say he pursues causes because they are heartfelt.  "He wants to be somewhere where he can make a difference in people's lives," said Coleman.  Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, said Noriega returned from his service in Afghanistan far more driven and with a greater sense that he wanted to be a legislative leader "as opposed to a grunt or a foot soldier."  Noriega said two things affected him. He said his service in Afghanistan and the death of state Rep. Joe Moreno, D-Houston, in an auto crash made him realize how "fragile" everyone is. "I realized I had in the neighborhood of 10,000 days left," Noriega said. "With the time you've got left, you've got to make something of it."

House Republican Caucus Chairman Frank Corte Jr. of San Antonio said Noriega has done a good job of representing his district, but he said the values of Texans statewide are more conservative and favor lower taxes and fewer government programs.

"To represent the whole state (as senator), you don't have to be a Republican or a Democrat, but you should at least represent the values of the whole state," Corte said.
But Melissa Noriega said she and her husband try to do that in their public service. She said they believe in public schools and higher education, health care access and a strong military. She said they support responsible business. And they want to help "when folks need a hand up, not a handout," stressing there is a difference.
"We see public service as a ministry, like a calling for a minister, and we believe we are doing what God put us on Earth to do, being public servants," Melissa Noriega said.
r.g.ratcliffe@chron.com

Undocumented workers and SS numbers: They are not crooks

Whenever the Congress decided to work on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, you often heard laws coming up about undocumented people not being able to regularize if they used false social security numbers. This is something that was considered when the DREAM ACT came up in the Senate in October 2006.

The truth is that just about anyone that is not documented has to use a false Social Security number if they want to work. The underground economy might be there, but usually those jobs are not steady enough to support anyone. Workers need to be employed by companies, and that means needing someone's S.S. number.

Before you begin panicking that everyone's number has been stolen or you will lose your benefits, consider that most of the numbers are either made up or taken from deceased persons. Immigrant workers don't want to steal your social security benefits. They just want to work. In fact, you have little reason to worry. Even if they put money into the S.S. system, it is highly unlikely they will ever get any benefits that U.S. residents and citizens get from Social Security. In other words, their money goes down the drain - at least for them. The money, however, is a great kitty for the rest of us to make use of when S.S. begins to run dry...


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/20/AR2008102001075.html?hpid=topnews

Supreme Court to Hear Case on Illegal Immigrants' Use of Fake IDs

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 20, 2008; 1:53 PM

The Supreme Court today accepted a case with significant implications for the government's crackdown on illegal immigration, agreeing to review whether prosecutors have to prove that defendants in aggravated identity theft cases knew they were victimizing a real person.

The justices will hear the appeal of Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican illegal immigrant who used false identification to get a job at a steel plant in Illinois. He was convicted of aggravated identity theft and other counts and sentenced to more than six years in prison.

Flores-Figueroa argued that the government failed to prove that he knew the fraudulent documents belonged to a real person as opposed to being fabricated. Lower courts ruled that the government did not have to prove that, accepting the Justice Department's position in this and other aggravated identify theft cases. Three appellate courts have rendered decisions backing the government.

But three other appellate courts have ruled otherwise, and the Supreme Court is expected to resolve the dispute.

The importance of the case to prosecutors was shown during a raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in rural Iowa in May. As hundreds of immigration agents descended on the plant, prosecutors summoned defense lawyers to the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids.

Their message was blunt: The illegal immigrants arrested must plead guilty to lesser counts or face indictment on charges of aggravated identity theft and possible mandatory two-year prison terms.

"It was a hammer over everyone's head," said Dan Vondra, a lawyer who represented several of the 302 detainees who quickly took the deal. "For these people, two years in federal prison was unbearable."

The raid highlighted the Bush administration's increasing use of the tough new charge in its crackdown on illegal immigrants at work sites, part of the escalating campaign against undocumented immigrants nationwide. But the tactic is under attack from critics, and the split among appellate courts over the government's burden of proof in aggravated identity theft cases has now prompted the Supreme Court review.

An adverse Supreme Court ruling probably would not affect the government's ability to charge aggravation in non-immigration identity theft cases. A criminal who, for example, steals someone's Social Security number and empties his or her bank account clearly knows he is victimizing a real person.

But experts said a loss for the Justice Department in the Flores-Figueroa case would devastate its ability to bring aggravated identity theft cases against illegal immigrants because most of them do not know whether their fake IDs belong to someone else.

"It would effectively gut a provision clearly designed to crack down on immigration-related identity theft," said Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tough immigration enforcement.

Critics of the administration's approach say that the charge is not needed and that deporting illegal immigrants should be enough. "They're just piling on," said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

But federal officials say the charge is a key part of their arsenal because its penalties are substantially tougher than those of other immigration counts. Officials point out that terrorists use false identities, a sensitive issue since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "Post 9/11, we also recognize that identity theft poses a security risk to all of us," Deborah J. Rhodes, senior associate deputy attorney general, said in July at a congressional hearing on the Iowa raid on an Agriprocessors plant in Postville. The raid was the largest criminal work-site enforcement operation in U.S. history.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which led the raid, declined to comment on the pending Supreme Court case. Pat A. Reilly, an ICE spokeswoman, said the agency "is going to seek the highest-level charges it can get on anyone it encounters in a work-site operation or any other kind of illegal activity."

Congress created the aggravated identity theft charge as part of a 2004 law targeting identity theft broadly. The felony charge is defined as knowingly transferring, possessing or using "without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person."

The conviction of Flores-Figueroa in federal court in Iowa was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

"Someone who intends to steal another's identity is worthy of greater punishment than one who unintentionally picks an identification number out of thin air that happens to match one already issued to someone else," attorneys for Flores-Figueroa argued in a brief to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department's solicitor general's office contends that the conviction should be upheld but asked the court to take up the matter because "there is now a clear and entrenched conflict among the courts of appeals."

Prosecutors also defend their actions in the Postville raid, in which 389 illegal immigrants were detained. About two-thirds of them were initially charged by criminal complaint with aggravated identity theft, but those charges were dropped. Most of the 302 defendants who pleaded guilty to lesser felony immigration charges were sentenced to five months in prison.

"We had evidence that supported the more severe charge," said Bob Teig, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Cedar Rapids. "I suppose it depends on what side you're on whether that's a carrot or a stick."

Not ‘A Mexican Thing’: Undocumented Asian students face stigma and lack of financial aid, job experience

Not ‘A Mexican Thing’: Undocumented Asian students face stigma and lack of financial aid, job experience

Asian Week
The Voice of Asian America
Beleza Chan, Oct 13, 2008

Picture an undocumented student, and the first image to pop up is unlikely to be an Asian one.

Yet a recent report by the University of California Office of the President revealed that 40 to 44 percent of undocumented students in the UC system are Asian. This is definitely not “a Mexican thing,” which is how one undocumented student characterized the Asian community’s dismissive views towards undocumented immigration.

“People will ask you: ‘Are you AB 540? Because obviously you are not Latina,’” explains Tam, a 24-year-old of Vietnamese descent who recently graduated from UCLA (the last names of the undocumented students in this article have been withheld to protect their identities).

The 2001 state law AB 540 lowers the cost of tuition at California public universities for students who attended a high school in the state for at least three years. According to the UC Office of the President, over 1,639 students have benefited from AB 540; out of those, 1,200 were legal residents or citizens.

Out-of-state students attending California colleges filed a suit in 2005 challenging the law, objecting to the state’s practice of allowing illegal immigrants to pay significantly lower tuition than they pay. The suit was dismissed by the Yolo County Superior Court in 2006.

But on September 15, the Court of Appeal in Sacramento issued a ruling that challenges AB 540 on the grounds that it contradicts federal law, which holds that states cannot grant educational benefits based on residency.

But life continues for those who have made it to college. Faced with financial burdens and legal concerns in addition to the normal college student worries about classes and career, today’s unexpected and overlooked Asian undocumented students are screaming for help.

Tam came to the U.S. when she was six years old, and like many Americans, she wanted to go to college. Although undocumented students come from low-income families, they are not eligible for any kind of state or federal financial aid. Tam needed her parents’ help to pay for school, but she refused to ask.

“My major was English and I did not want to deal with ‘We’re paying for your education, so you will have to study what we want,’” explained Tam, who paid for school with money from work and private scholarships.

Rest of article

Free Copy of Michael Moore's "SLACKER"

Michael Moore is giving away downloads of his movie "Slacker." He is doing this, hoping that it will help bring out the vote on Nov. 4.  

link to complete film

Movie Trailer to SLACKER:

thanks again to A. for sending this along.

Why can't a Muslim kid become president when he grows up?

Although it was very disappointing to see General Powell go along with the Bush Administration on that fateful day when Powell told untruths to the United Nations about the supposed (and fairy taled) Weapons of Mass Destruction - Powell has made a great attempt to redeem himself by not only endorsing Obama, a Democrat (since Powell is a Republican) he also deeply criticized Republicans (and Americans in general) regarding the party's ongoing demonization of Muslims (see video below).

Scapegoats during economic crisis?

It has already started in the UK.  Phil Woolas, Immigration Minister in the UK has said that immigration is a "thorny" issue in times of financial crisis and that he will do what he can to make it more difficult for people to immigrate to the UK.  

As the pie gets smaller, who will be left out?  Certainly not the executives from AIG (see Financial Times post below Independent article).

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/welfare-groups-condemn-ministers-pledge-on-migrants-966240.html

Welfare groups condemn minister's pledge on migrants

Phil Woolas's promise to make it harder for foreign workers to settle in Britain sparks fury

Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Phil Woolas said that immigration becomes 'an extremely thorny issue' at times of economic woe



Phil Woolas said that immigration becomes 'an extremely thorny issue' at times of economic woe

Britain's new immigration minister was accused yesterday of leading a "baying pack" after he suggested the growing economic crisis could force a reduction in the number of migrants allowed into the UK.

In his first public statement in his new position, Phil Woolas conceded that immigration became an "extremely thorny" issue during an economic downturn when people already living in this country were losing their jobs. He also pledged the Government would respond by making it even harder for non-European Union nationals to come to Britain to work and live.

His warning was condemned by immigrant welfare organisations, who claimed the move towards quotas conflicted with the Government's settled policy on migration, which included the recently introduced "points-based" entry system. Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service, said: "Whenever we face a recession, poor old migrants get the blame, but I don't think I was expecting a newly appointed minister to lead the baying pack."

Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said he would be astonished at a Labour immigration minister "in effect, changing the policy". "His predecessor and the Home Secretary have made it clear they do not support a quota," he said.

Immigration has consistently been a politically sensitive issue for New Labour for the past decade. Although a series of immigration reviews reduced numbers of new citizens settling in the UK every year, official figures show that the population grew by nearly two million – to almost 61 million people – between 2001 and 2007.

Mr Woolas has made it clear the Government will not allow it to continue rising without restraint, particularly with the economy in difficulties. "It's been too easy to get into this country in the past and it's going to get harder," he told The Times. "If people are being made unemployed, the question of immigration becomes extremely thorny. This Government isn't going to allow the population to go up to 70 million. There has to be a balance between the number of people coming in and the number of people leaving."

His warning that the Government planned to "break the link" between people coming to work and subsequently gaining citizenship was welcomed by pressure groups and MPs who have been demanding action to limit the number of people allowed to settle in the UK.

The Labour MP Frank Field claimed Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, had signalled a plan for fresh limits at a meeting earlier this month. "It is long overdue, but it is clear the Government is moving towards a new position on immigration and it will be the first government whose views on immigration reflect the views of the overwhelming majority of the British public," Mr Field said. "What matters now is delivery. If our population is to be stabilised, immigration must be substantially reduced. For a start, we need to end the virtually automatic right of those who come on work permits to settle permanently in Britain."

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the pressure group Migrationwatch, said the minister's intervention "could be a significant turning point". "I think the economic crisis has shown up the weakness of uncontrolled immigration. This is the very first time that a government minister has recognised the link between immigration and population. The Government has been in denial about that for years," he said.

The shadow Home Secretary, Dominic Grieve, said: "We have been calling for immigration limits for years but the Government has repeatedly poured scorn on this. It appears it now realises just how out of touch it is."

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AIG acts amid probe by attorney general
Financial Times
By Joanna Chung in New York

Published: October 17 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 17 2008 03:00

AIG yesterday agreed to help recover any illegal compensation payments made to Martin Sullivan, former chief executive, and other senior management as part of an investigation by Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

The company, which was rescued by the government last month with an $85bn loan, is also withholding an estimated $10m payment from Steven Bensinger, who served as chief financial officer until May, and is immediately cancelling all junkets or perks.

The announcements came a day after Mr Cuomo threatened legal action unless AIG stopped "outrageous" expenditures and helped recover past ones, including certain executive compensation. He said such expenditures could have violated a New York law...

for complete Financial Times article click here

I The secrets of the Crown Prince

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http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1

McCain and the POW Cover-up
The "war hero" candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

By Sydney H. Schanberg
September 18, 2008

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon's performance was an insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon's position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political conditions." But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party "in accordance with its own constitutional provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored - and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.

My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few—if any—are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain's role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona Senator, now the Republican candidate for President, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and national security advisor, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H. W. Bush's defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington...

II The secrets of the Crown Prince

--
McCain and the POW's
The Nation Institute, September 18, 2008
continued

McCain's Role


The Truth Bill

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called "the Truth Bill" and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: "[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."


The McCain Bill


DOD cites the McCain Bill in denying a FOIA request


Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as "the McCain Bill," suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at left, when the Pentagon cited McCain's bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying: "Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.

About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said: "This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington." He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, "would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks."

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence—documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs' sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned—has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos."

Some of McCain's fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn't share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter—a response to McCain's stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote: "John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were 'last known alive'? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?"


DOD denies access to McCain's 1973 debriefing


It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his post-war behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain. (See the Pentagon's rejection of my attempt to obtain records of this debriefing, at left.)

All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all US forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral.

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the "Crown Prince," something McCain acknowledges in the book.

Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."

He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but "never discussed it at length"—and the Admiral, who died in 1981, didn't indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes: "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."

Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.

Many stories have been written about McCain's explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loathe to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: "This is a man not at peace with himself."

He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: If American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about...

III The Secrets of the Crown Prince

--

McCain and the POW's
The Nation Institute, September 18, 2008
continued

10 Key Pieces of Evidence That Men Were Left Behind


New York Times, Feb. 2, 1973

1. In Paris, where the Vietnam peace treaty was negotiated, the United States asked Hanoi for the list of American prisoners to be returned, fearing that Hanoi would hold some prisoners back. The North Vietnamese refused, saying they would produce the list only after the treaty was signed. Nixon agreed with Kissinger that they had no leverage left, and Kissinger signed the accord on January 27, 1973, without the prisoner list. When Hanoi produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, US intelligence agencies expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on February 2, 1973, about the discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in Laos, only nine of whom were being returned. The headline read, in part: "Laos POW List Shows 9 from US —Document Disappointing to Washington as 311 Were Believed Missing." And the story, by John Finney, said that other Washington officials "believe the number of prisoners [in Laos] is probably substantially higher." The paper never followed up with any serious investigative reporting—nor did any other mainstream news organization.

2. Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, both speaking at a public session and under oath, said they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data—letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind." This ran counter to what President Nixon told the public in a nationally televised speech on March 29, 1973, when the repatriation of the 591 was in motion: "Tonight," Nixon said, "the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come. For the first time in twelve years, no American military forces are in Vietnam. All our American POWs are on their way home." Documents unearthed since then show that aides had already briefed Nixon about the contrary evidence.

Schlesinger was asked by the Senate committee for his explanation of why President Nixon would have made such a statement when he knew Hanoi was still holding prisoners. He replied: "One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States...was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters..." This testimony struck me as a bombshell. The New York Times appropriately reported it on page one but again there was no sustained follow-up by the Times or any other major paper or national news outlet.

3. Over the years, the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports, which are impressive in their detail. A lot of the sightings described a secondary tier of prison camps many miles from Hanoi. Yet the DIA, after reviewing all these reports, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were alive.

4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since the intercepts were made by a "third party"—namely Thailand—they could not be regarded as authentic. That's some Catch-22: The US trained a third party to take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third party did the monitoring, the messages weren't valid.

Here, from CIA files, is an example that clearly exposes the farce. On December 27, 1980, a Thai military signal team picked up a message saying that prisoners were being moved out of Attopeu (in southern Laos) by aircraft "at 1230 hours." Three days later a message was sent from the CIA station in Bangkok to the CIA director's office in Langley. It read, in part: "The prisoners...are now in the valley in permanent location (a prison camp at Nhommarath in Central Laos). They were transferred from Attopeu to work in various places...POWs were formerly kept in caves and are very thin, dark and starving." Apparently the prisoners were real. But the transmission was declared "invalid" by Washington because the information came from a "third party" and thus could not be deemed credible.

5. A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government's satellite system in the late 1980s and early '90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible. To the layman's eye, the satellite photos, some of which I've seen, show markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses—such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings. What were they, then? "Shadows and vegetation," the government said, insisting that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response—shadows and vegetation. On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing man's name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes, shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic evidence, to comment to me: "If grass can spell out people's names and a secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass."

6. On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground—a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang —could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors—as US pilots had been trained to do—"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POWs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, according to the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."

McCain attended that committee hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect—she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those twenty POWs.

7. As previously mentioned, in April 1993, in a Moscow archive, a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973.

In the transcript, General Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 US prisoners were being held. Quang said that many of the prisoners would be held back from Washington after the accords as bargaining chips for war reparations. General Quang's report added: "This is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368 prisoners of war. The rest we have not revealed. The government of the USA knows this well, but it does not know the exact number...and can only make guesses based on its losses. That is why we are keeping the number of prisoners of war secret, in accordance with the politburo's instructions." The report then went on to explain in clear and specific language that a large number would be kept back to ensure reparations.

The reaction to the document was immediate. After two decades of denying it had kept any prisoners, Hanoi responded to the revelation by calling the transcript a fabrication.

Similarly, Washington—which had over the same two decades refused to recant Nixon's declaration that all the prisoners had been returned—also shifted into denial mode. The Pentagon issued a statement saying the document "is replete with errors, omissions and propaganda that seriously damage its credibility," and that the numbers were "inconsistent with our own accounting."

Neither American nor Vietnamese officials offered any rationale for who would plant a forged document in the Soviet archives and why they would do so. Certainly neither Washington nor Moscow—closely allied with Hanoi—would have any motive, since the contents were embarrassing to all parties, and since both the United States and Vietnam had consistently denied the existence of unreturned prisoners. The Russian archivists simply said the document was "authentic."

8. In his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, Retired Command Sgt. Major Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government's vows to leave no men behind.

"Years later, I spoke at length with a former highly placed member of the North Vietnamese diplomatic corps, and this person asked me point-blank: 'Why did the Americans never attempt to recover their remaining POWs after the conclusion of the war?'" Haney writes. He continued, saying that he came to believe senior government officials had called off those missions in 1981 and 1982. (His account is on pages 314 to 321 of my paperback copy of the book.)

9. There is also evidence that in the first months of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1981, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi in Indochina. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice-President Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Advisor Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion relating to the ransom offer and reported on it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president's going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story and claiming his memory had played tricks on him. His new version was that some POW activists had asked him about such an offer in a meeting that took place in 1986, when he was no longer in government. "It appears," he said in the letter, "that there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW/MIAs for $4 billion."

But the episode didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981, when the offer was discussed by Reagan, Bush, Casey, Allen and other cabinet officials.

Syphrit, a veteran of the Vietnam War, told the committee he was willing to testify but they would have to subpoena him. Treasury opposed his appearance, arguing that voluntary testimony would violate the trust between the Secret Service and those it protects. It was clear that coming in on his own could cost Syphrit his career. The committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him.

In the committee's final report, dated January 13, 1993 (on page 284), the panel not only chastised Syphrit for his failure to testify without a subpoena ("The committee regrets that the Secret Service agent was unwilling..."), but noted that since Allen had recanted his testimony about the Roosevelt Room briefing, Syphrit's testimony would have been "at best, uncorroborated by the testimony of any other witness." The committee omitted any mention that it had made a decision not to ask the other two surviving witnesses, Bush and Reagan, to give testimony under oath. (Casey had died.)

10. In 1990, Colonel Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA's Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer, which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners—a "black hole," these officials called it.


Millard A. Peck's Feb. 12, 1991, letter of resignation


Peck explained all this in his telling resignation letter of February 12, 1991, eight months after he had taken the job. He said he viewed it as "sort of a holy crusade" to restore the integrity of the office but was defeated by the Pentagon machine. The four-page, single-spaced letter was scathing, describing the putative search for missing men as "a cover-up."

Peck charged that, at its top echelons, the Pentagon had embraced a "mind-set to debunk" all evidence of prisoners left behind. "That national leaders continue to address the prisoner of war and missing in action issue as the 'highest national priority,' is a travesty," he wrote. "The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort, and may never have been....Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow through on any of the sightings, nor is there a responsive 'action arm' to routinely and aggressively pursue leads."

"I became painfully aware," his letter continued, "that I was not really in charge of my own office, but was merely a figurehead or whipping boy for a larger and totally Machiavellian group of players outside of DIA...I feel strongly that this issue is being manipulated and controlled at a higher level, not with the goal of resolving it, but more to obfuscate the question of live prisoners and give the illusion of progress through hyperactivity." He named no names but said these players are "unscrupulous people in the Government or associated with the Government" who "have maintained their distance and remained hidden in the shadows, while using the [POW] Office as a 'toxic waste dump' to bury the whole 'mess' out of sight." Peck added that "military officers...who in some manner have 'rocked the boat' [have] quickly come to grief."

Peck concluded: "From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural death."

The disillusioned Colonel not only resigned but asked to be retired immediately from active military service. The press never followed up...

for complete article click here

Youth Vote Numbers are STAGGERING

Will there be an avalanche of under 25s on November 4? Let's hope someone doesn't find a way to slow down the lines. If this is your first time voting and something goes wrong and you have to wait for hours, PLEASE PLEASE hang in there. Your vote is important... don't leave the line!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081103/currier

Will the Youth Vote Swing This Election?
By Cora Currier

October 17, 2008

As state deadlines pass, voter registration numbers are reaching record highs. The Associated Press estimated last week that nationwide there have been more than 9 million new registrations in the past six months, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans four to one. Get-out-the-vote groups that target young people are reporting unprecedented numbers of young voters added to the rolls. This week Rock the Vote, one of the largest nonpartisan GOTV organizations, surpassed 2.3 million registrations this election cycle.


"The numbers are staggering," said Andy Karsch, director of Rock the Vote's bus project, which has been touring around the country since September. Through its bus tour, Rock the Vote has secured more than 1 million new registrants in the past month alone. The Obama campaign would not give out specifics on the number of voters it had registered through its outreach effort, Vote for Change, but Chris Hughes, the campaign's director of online organizing, said that the website had been "hugely successful; it surpassed all our expectations. Almost everyone who came to the website followed through with the whole registration process." On a local level, a group called New Era Colorado has registered more than 11,000 voters, according to executive director Steve Fenberg. "The registration levels are enormous in Colorado," he said. "There's an excitement on the ground I've never seen before."

The number of newly registered Democrats eclipses Bush's margins of victory in swing states like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. In North Carolina Democrats have registered twice as many voters as Republicans, helping to put the state in play. A big reason is the number of new young voters, 18- to 29-year-olds who favor Obama by upwards of twenty points.

In Virginia, once a Republican bastion, the State Board of Elections had received 306,000 new voter registration applications by the end of September: 42 percent of them were from people younger than 25. In Pennsylvania the number of registered Democrats has increased by about 13 percent, thanks in part to heavy targeting of the state's large college population. Since many states' deadlines still haven't passed, the exact percentage of new registrants nationally who are under 30 won't be clear until after the election. Historically, new registrants tend to be younger, and both campaigns and nonpartisan efforts have overwhelmingly targeted the demographic.

Of course, registration is only part of the puzzle--getting voters to the polls is the ultimate goal. Yet the registration numbers thus far bode well for November. According to the US Census Bureau, only 49 percent of people ages 18 to 29 voted in 2004, but 81 percent of those who were registered voted. Even among 18- to-21-year-olds, all new voters based on their age, roughly 80 percent of registrants voted. These rates of participation among registered young voters could spell a record high turnout in terms of raw numbers this election cycle.

What's more, organizers are pointing to a number of factors that may indicate that there's real substance behind all the talk of young voters this year. For one, youth turnout rose in the 2004 and 2006 elections, and it doubled and tripled in some states' primaries in 2008, compared with 2000.

There are also the technological advancements that have served as vital communication tools in getting people registered and to the polls. GOTV groups like Rock the Vote are finding that the number of people they reach has expanded exponentially thanks to peer-to-peer networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. The Nation's Ari Melber has reported extensively on the Obama campaign's effective use of new technology to reach voters, such as utilizing text messaging and their own networking site MyBO.

"All this targeting and talk is having an effect," Fenberg said of his experience on the ground in Colorado. "People are plugged in, and we're seeing more excitement than ever."

Karsch said Rock the Vote's staff has felt the same kind of excitement. "I'd be shocked if there wasn't an unprecedented turnout," he said. "This is a transitional election, and people want to be a part of it." If the registration numbers are any indication, new young voters could change the game come November.



About Cora Currier
Cora Currier, a contributor to the Campaign '08 blog and is a former Nation intern. more...

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Put water on the fire

With the global financial crisis going on, no one really knows how things will end up. On MSNBC last night one interviewee called this (in 2008) the Great Depression. Let's hope it doesn't get that bad.

The truth is, many people have already lost a lot. Especially those who had their retirement funds in the stock market.

If you add that to people losing their houses because of bad mortgages, families losing loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of disabled soldiers coming home, and a bunch of angry kids who haven't been prepared well by our failing public school system...we could be in big trouble.

At this point it is extremely important for the McCain campaign to clamp down on the violent threats being screamed out at their rallies. It is time for a long conversation, not a Saturday Night Live type presidential debate. McCain, Palin, and the GOP need to stop telling everyone to be afraid. They need to encourage their supporters to think of positive solutions instead of letting them scream about knocking off the opponent.

Suggestions to the McCain people

Tell your supporters to

1. be sure and vote.

2. not to join the crowd that is working towards suppressing the vote (suppression breeds anger)

3. volunteer in the neighborhood. (there is still lots of work to do in Houston cleaning up after Hurricane Ike)

4. volunteer at your local public school.

5. take a night class at the local college - one on politics!

6. pray.

7. read a book about globalization.

8. watch the U.S. Senate or House of Reps. on C-Span - so they can see some of how our gov't works.

9. read a book about the history of the Middle East (esp. the last 200 years)

Waiting for the Barbarians in The Nation, October 16, 2008

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/17/AR2008101702496.html?nav=hcmodule

A Rage No One Should Be Stoking

Washington Post

By Colbert I. King
Saturday, October 18, 2008; A15

"Kill him": the battle cry of a lynch mob and words yelled out by a man at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Fla., this month, according to my Post colleague Dana Milbank.

Some observers claim that the proposed killing was directed not toward Barack Obama but at Bill Ayers, the co-founder of the radical Weather Underground that bombed public buildings during the turbulent Vietnam era. Ayers, now a college professor who has served with Obama and other noted Chicagoans in civic enterprises -- and hosted a campaign event for Obama's initial run for the state legislature -- is being portrayed by John McCain's campaign as Barack's bosom buddy, the facts notwithstanding.

Whether the call for assassination was aimed at Obama or Ayers is immaterial. It represents a dangerous new low in American politics.

Tell a rabid audience that Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" (as Palin has done), imply that Obama is friendly with people out to destroy America (as she also has done) and what do you expect?

The ugliness is stunning.

Milbank also reported that in Clearwater, one of Palin's supporters shouted a racial epithet at a network soundman and told him, "Sit down, boy."

This month, an angry white man was arrested in Monroe, La., after allegedly threatening election officials who had not sent him a voter registration card. He badly wanted to cast his vote, he told police, so that he could "keep the nigger out of office."

Dangerous stuff. That's why Georgia Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, spoke out.

It is no accident that the English-language operation of al-Jazeera, the Arab-language news network, tried to capture and broadcast to the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere a glimpse of America's more sinister side.

Al-Jazeera found it in St. Clairsville, Ohio, a white, working-class community that was the site of an Oct. 12 Palin rally.

Armed with a video camera and a hand-held mike, interviewer Casey Kauffman -- who by appearance could pass as a Buckeye State native -- recorded the following observations about Obama:

From an older white woman: "I'm afraid if he wins, the black [sic] will take over. He's not a Christian. This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?"

An older white man: "When you got a Negro running for president, you need a first-stringer. He's definitely a second-stringer."

A young white man holding a child: "He seems like a sheep -- or a wolf in sheep's clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin -- she's filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she's gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House."

An older white man: "He's related to a known terrorist, for one."

An older white man: "He is friends with a terrorist of this country!"

An older white man: "He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama."

A young white woman: "Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody's still kinda -- a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but . . . I dunno, it's just kinda . . . a little unnerving."

A white woman: "Obama and his wife, I'm concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that."

An older white woman: "I don't like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash . . . because we're not!"

The video also shows an Obama supporter, identified only as Taylor, waving a placard on a roadside, greeting motorists as they traveled to the Palin rally.

Taylor told al-Jazeera that he's been shocked by his neighbors' reaction. "I've been called the N-word, I've been called a Muslim, I've been called un-American," he said.

"I'm worried that these people . . . the tension is getting thicker and thicker, when people like that . . . it's starting to scare me. . . . To be specific," Taylor said, "I'm afraid some of these people might try to hurt Obama."

With Palin's supporters chanting in the background, Kauffman tells viewers that the divisive nature of this year's presidential campaign has brought into the open what is usually discussed behind closed doors in America. "It's a reminder," intoned Kauffman, "that hate and fear are powerful forces in American society."

Was this fodder served up by al-Jazeera to feed anti-American sentiment overseas?

To be sure. But the camera didn't lie.

Did al-Jazeera, however, record the whole truth?

Do those Ohio residents, or the Florida Palin supporter who snapped "Sit down, boy," or that angry man in Louisiana who wants to "keep the nigger out of office" represent today's America?

Or are they part of a dwindling breed of die-hards who have seen their best days? I believe they are the latter.

But we, and the rest of the world, will know more on Nov. 4.

·

Last week, in writing about the stewardship of troubled youths by the D.C. Department of Youth and Rehabilitation Services, I reported a recent assault by juveniles on a correctional officer at the agency's Oak Hill facility.

Yesterday, I learned that another correctional officer at Oak Hill had been severely beaten and taken to a hospital in Laurel. Hours after I inquired, DYRS told me: "We can confirm that a physical altercation occurred this afternoon, at [Oak Hill], between a staff member and a youth. There are conflicting accounts as to who initiated the incident, staff or youth. Staff requested that we call an ambulance, which we did, and the staff member involved was transported to the hospital. The incident is currently under investigation."

As of last night, the officer's family was with him at the hospital.

DYRS continues to say that it cannot provide a count of youth assaults against staff this year or in 2007.

kingc@washpost.com

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