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THANK YOU Bob Fitrakis - 'Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy'

We caught Bob Fitrakis' 2/25/04 article, "Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", thru Truthout.org      

THANK YOU, THANK YOU and did we say . THANK YOU! Please continue to shine a light on the dangers of paperless voting machines.  My husband and I are very concerned and scared about the integrity of our voting system. We have never missed walking into our polling place to vote in an election since we were each old enough to vote.  However, if paperless voting machines are put into use, we will not trust the process and our answer is Absentee Ballot.  Over 500 American soldiers have died in Iraq for Democracy and the assurance of a Fair Election.  Shouldn't we Americans also be assured a Fair Election?

A new electronic voting scheme

Dear Bob Fitrakis:

I read your interesting article on Diebold and electronic voting in the 2/24 Columbus Free Press

There's another, more reliable, and cheaper way of doing electronic voting, and it could use existing machines; no need to purchase new ones from Diebold.

There are more than 270,000 ATMs in the U.S.; it would not be difficult to write voting programs for them, and to issue ATM 'voting' cards to registered voters.

A voting system using ATMs would be a LOT less expensive than the $5 to $8 billion projected for using new voting equipment throughout the US, and be more secure than all existing and many proposed voting systems. Such a system could be a very interesting source of revenue for an ATM manufacturer like NCR.

ATMs have very accurate methods for dealing with depositor's (and the bank's) money; this same accuracy could be adapted to vote counting. Banks already have a secure and fraud-resistant system for sending ATM data to central computers.

How might an ATM voting system work ? Prior to election day registered

USS Des Moines

I am trying to locate former crew members of the heavy cruiser USS DES MOINES. Our annual reunion is held in rural MERCER, PA each August. This year it is on the 6th through the 8th. They can contact me at (321) 632-6347 or via email at: tmmax@hotmail.com. Thank You!

Tom MacFarlane
Cocoa, Florida

50 Years of Nuclear Testing Fallibility. Bravo?

March 1 st , 2004 marks the 50 th anniversary of the 1954 US "Bravo" hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands that unexpectedly turned out to be the largest US nuclear test ever exploded. "Bravo" gouged a crater about a mile wide in the reef of Bikini Atoll. Within seconds of the blast, the fireball was nearly three miles in diameter. On Rongerik, an island 135 miles east of the blast, the illumination from "Bravo" was visible for almost one minute. Physicist Marshall Rosenbluth, located on a ship about 30 miles away, stated that the fireball "just kept rising and rising, and spreading.it looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like on the surface.and the air started getting filled with this gray stuff, which I guess was somewhat radioactive coral."

      Human Fallibility

Kerry

Paper-Trail is not enough

Regarding Bob Fitrakis's article on the Diebold (and other) Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines that the US Government is trying to foist on the American public.

It is very important to not get the wool pulled over our eyes by the term: "Paper-Trail".

The DRE machine does not normally leave any kind of evidence of what a single voter voted,...making a recount impossible.

Some think that we are able to eliminate the propensity for Vote-Fraud inherent in the DRE machine by requiring a "Paper-Trail",..ie...a print-out of th TouchScreen display.

This is a misleading deception,...for these paper-ballots are NOT used nor counted.

To make a Paper-"Trail" meaningful,....the Paper-Ballot the machine prints-out must be the Primary artifact that is actually hand-counted. The DRE's quick result MAY possible by used as NON-Official result while the OFFICIAL hand-counted Paper-ballot count is underway.

If you need any more info or explanation on thise EXTREMELY timely topic,...please contact me.

Truly,
Bob Donatelle

The Diebold-type Computerized voting machine can NOT give an OFFICIAL count,...a Paper-Ballot ONLY can be OFFICIAL

The electronic result inside the  Diebold voting machine is not sufficiently trust-worthty to be an official result.

We do NOT want a paper-"TRAIL", ...We want  Paper to be the PRIMARY document that becomes the Official count.

The only solution when using a TouchScreen  is that when the voter completes his vote on the TouchScreen, ...the touchscreen voted-ballot gets printed-out and is used as the primary document that gets hand-counted. This hand-counted Paper-ballot becomes the Official count. The internal computer count is NOT to be used.

CIA Intelligence Reports Seven Months Before 9/11 Said Iraq Posed No Threat To U.S., Containment Was Working

CIA Director George Tenet testified before Congress in February 2001 that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or to other countries in the Middle East.

But immediately after the terrorist attacks on 9-11, which the Bush administration has said Iraq is partially responsible for, the President and his advisers were already making a case for war against Iraq without so much as providing a shred of evidence to back up their allegations that Iraq and its former President, Saddam Hussein, helped al-Qaida hijackers plan the catastrophe.

It was then, after the 9-11 attacks, that intelligence reports from the CIA radically changed from previous months, which said Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S., to now show Iraq had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and was in hot pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration seized upon the reports to build public support for the war and used the information to eventually justify a preemptive strike against the country last March.

Oscar smiles on "Fog of War" and its warnings on Iraq

Even on Oscar night, the war in Vietnam still rages. With a billion people glued to their tubes, the old battle cry that "the whole world is watching" was once again true.

As "Fog of War" won Sunday night for best documentary, we have an AWOL president prancing in a flight suit he did not earn, and a Democratic front-runner who was a hero on both sides an issue that still deeply divides us.

Most recently we've also had "The Quiet American," a stunning portrayal of how the US actually got into that horrible war. Behind them both loom the ghosts of three men: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and the centerpiece of "Fog of War, Robert McNamara.

Kennedy is still with us because we don't know what he would have done. Bitter disputes still rage over the meaning of his withdrawal of 1000 (of 16,000) advisors just before his death, and his pledge to be out of Vietnam in 1965. Angry lawsuits have flared up---and could again---over whether Lyndon Johnson was misled, who might have done it, and why he escalated that catastrophic war in an unparalleled act of individual, party and national suicide.

Spying On UN Sec General Part Of Larger Campaign To Undermine UN Missions In Iraq

More evidence emerged Thursday about the United States and Britain's underhanded tactics aimed at undermining the United Nations Security Council as it considered a U.S.-backed resolution in launching a preemptive strike against Iraq last year.  

  Clare Short, a former member of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, told the BBC that British intelligence officials spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan during the run-up to war in Iraq so it could learn how Security Council members would vote on the resolution. Short said she read transcripts produced by British spies who allegedly bugged Annan's office before the Iraq war.    

A UN spokesman said any such espionage, if true, would be illegal.    

This latest revelation is just another example of how the U.S. and Britain tried to undermine UN missions ahead of the United States' invasion of Iraq and calls into question whether intelligence used to show that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction-which the Bush administration cited as the key reason for waging war-was indeed "sexed up" so the U.S. could launch a preemptive strike.    

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