Reply #146: It appears, on the surface, that they did a "sting" operation on CBS...

[Peace Patriot]

because of the Abu Ghraib photos. At the time, polls were showing that 63% of the American people oppose torture "under any circumstances" (May 04). That's a big number which necessarily includes many Republicans, and probably includes military personnel/families who are attached to the "quaint" Uniform Code of Military Justice. I think it's a very telling number--the "line on the sand" marking those Americans who were sticking to their sense of ethics, justice, lawfulness and right conduct, despite relentless fear mongering and war mongering. There was also only a 5 point difference between those who oppose torture "under any circumstances," and those who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, before the invasion (58%--Feb. '03), giving us an average of 60% opposed to the two pillars of Bush foreign policy: war and torture, with opposition on the rise in May '04.

I also suspect that Nicholas Berg--an expendable asset of some kind--got beheaded by our side, with video, to counter the Abu Ghraib shock to Americans. (His email account and password showed up in Zacharias Moussaoui's computer, according to his father--the computer that Coleen Rowley was trying to get access to before 9/11 (access denied); the FBI supposedly bought Nick's story that he met Moussaoui by accident on a bus, and lent him his computer, and then, later, the FBI let Berg into post-invasion Iraq, where he was wandering around "looking for business," an implausible story. Nick was in US custody for about 10 days just before he was beheaded.) The Berg beheading, which occurred just after the Abu Ghraib photos came to light, was used by the Freepers as evidence of the "enemy's" savagery.

It's interesting what they were obsessed with P.R.-wise, and why they were so worried about P.R. when they had direct control of the election system and apparently also could order up the doctoring of the exit polls. (I wish CBS would cover THAT story--the computer "breakdown" at the end of voting, and the matching of the exit polls to Diebold's and ES&S's "result"!*) Anyway, what I think it all points to is that they did not have perfect, predictable control of the election results. This has occurred to me also with regard to Ohio. Why would they need to engage in such visible, egregious violations of the Voting Rights Act, seemingly designed to rile people up and put a spotlight on election fraud? It leads me to believe that the electronic tabulators had to be pre-programmed, and percentages of vote flipping decided upon before the actual voting--that is, that it wasn't so easy to directly tweak the vote on election day. They were clearly working on multiple fronts--with massive purges and vote suppression of black/brown voters, and student voters; a tweak of 3% to 4% in the east coast time zone; shaving smaller %'s from Kerry in multiple states (both blue and red); and flips in some Electoral College/battleground states.

Then, on election night, when the exit polls revealed a 3% Kerry win (minus all the pre-purged voters--in short, a Kerry landslide), they had to hide that evidence. With 60% of Americans opposing Bush foreign policy, evidence of election fraud (and this was quite strong evidence) could have caused an insurrection. That must have been a interesting phone call.

*Now, back to CBS and the exit poll story (that none of the news monopolies has covered). It's a far more important story than Bush's Texas Nat'l Guard service--except for the "sting" part of that story, which I think is very important. Could it be that the "sting" on CBS--or, the savagery of it--was a pre-emptive strike on the one news organization that might have exposed--or balked at--the doctoring of the exit polls? Was it intended to put CBS into disarray--losing two top news people--on election day itself, possibly the "sting" combined with Bush Cartel operatives within CBS, gunning for any old-fashioned journalists who had both the clout and the curiosity to look into the doctoring of the exit polls?

You see, I don't think the controversies about Bush's service, or Kerry's (the Swiftboat liars), had anything to do with how the election went. I think peoples' minds were made up about Bush long before that. (Zogby stated that Bush's approval numbers were so low, leading up to the election, that he could not win.) The key to the election was in the voting machines, not in these nebulous items that float along the newsstream. So, why DO this controversy? Why plant real docs on CBS (and one re-typed one), to tempt them into it?

CBS reporting on the impossible tweak that was done to the exit polls (to get them to match the "results" of the "trade secret" programming code) would have been a far more devastating story, to the Bush Cartel, than Bush's Nat'l Guard service (everybody knew he was a shirker anyway). Why highlight the Nat'l Guard story? Why tempt CBS to cover it? What was this "sting" really about?

Some think it was punishment for the Abu Ghraib photos, but I'm hesitating over that, because I think that the "punishment" of Joe Wilson by Rove (for Wilson's NYT article on the Niger nuke allegation) was a cover story. Plame and her counter-proliferation network were the target all along, and Wilson may even have been baited to publish (there is evidence for it--or, the very least, that the Bushites expected his article), and the "crude" Niger forgeries may have also been bait to the CIA (to draw them into a public position of no nukes in Iraq, and to discredit the CIA when the nukes that the "Rome group" were intending to PLANT in Iraq, after the invasion, were "found" by Judith Miller.)

Many people interpret ALL of this (the "sting" on CBS, the Plame outing, and other events) as intimidation and repression. And I certainly think that's part of it. But I think we too easily dismiss the Bushites as mere thugs--brutal political players into crushing the opposition. I think they are far more than that. I think they are a criminal syndicate with extensive and incredibly evil operations inside and outside of the country. Their torture dungeons in eastern Europe, for instance, in my opinion have nothing whatever to do with "keeping Americans safe" but rather with covering up Bush Cartel crimes. So, too, their illegal non-FISA spying.

I do think that the Bushites needed a fairly smooth political story the end of which was Bush's "comeback win" in 2004 (and Rove even talked of a "mandate"--just after the so-called election). The Swiftboat liars were part of that con--creating some "reason" why Kerry might have lost. And then there was Cheney/Rove's statements about their "invisible" get-out-the-vote campaign, in the "churches" (for which there is ZERO evidence--the Dems blew the Repubs away in new voter registration in 2004, nearly 60/40.) They are (were?) walking a tightrope between rigged elections and the manufacture of an illusion of support (using their lapdog, corrupted and/or blackmailed corporate news monopolies), and they've been on this tightrope since about spring 2002, when it became clear that they were going to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq.

They are running a country in which they have almost no support (except for a rightwing minority of 30% to 40%, most of which has always been with us). So maintaining the illusion of an electoral "win" is critically important--far more important than a 30 year old story of Bush being AWOL. It's just a guess, on my part, that the CBS "sting" may have been aimed at covering up the election fraud (through creating disarray in the CBS news department) rather than political punishment for the Abu Ghraib photos (the Abu Ghraib torture story had other outlets), although it could have had both purposes.

There are two issues that seem to be verboten to Democrats: the issue of monopolistic news organizations, and the issue of our fraudulent election SYSTEM (Bushite corporations controlling vote tabulation with "trade secret," proprietary programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls.) (I mean, come on...). The news organizations are not just behemoth monopolies, they are war profiteers, in many cases. Where are the populist calls to bust them up? (Dean issued such a call--about a week before they destroyed his campaign with the doctored "scream" footage.) As for Bushites counting our votes in secret, even Dean has been rather quiet about it. (It's on page 112 or something of the DNC election report, in the fine print--election system vendors shouldn't be "partisan.") Very puzzling. Is it fear, or what?

The tightrope the Bushites are on--between rigged elections and an illusion of support--may have been only temporary, due to the newness and uncertainties of electronic vote rigging. They seem to be dropping the "illusion" part lately. Bush, with a 38% approval rating (and Cheney with 18%) are openly asserting dictatorial powers to break the law at will, and they don't seem to give a damn what anybody thinks about it. This may be because of recent experiments in even more massive vote flipovers than occurred in 2004. Recently, in Ohio, there were four ELECTION REFORM initiatives on the ballot, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, but which got flipped over to 60/40 LOSSES (!) on election day. And nobody seems able to do anything about it. With power like this--to just invent the vote--they can assert anything they want to, and who or what is there to stop them?

Bob Koehler, on the Ohio election initiatives;
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk

There are grass roots election reform movements around the country, which are having some successes. These are the main hope for our democracy right now. And some Dems are joining in, notably Russ Holt (HR 550, which has 169 co-sponsors, mostly Dems, and which will, among other things, ban undisclosed software), and Deborah Bowen, a CA state senator who is running for Sec of State, and has stated her opposition to undisclosed ("trade secret") software in our election system. Rigged elections are why Bush/Cheney is asserting dictatorial powers without caring much any more whether they have public, news media or Congressional support. They don't really need it. Or they think they don't. We'll see.