The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by US citizens without a warrant violated longstanding practices and could undermine a key US intelligence agency that's critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122505F.shtml

George Bush has no doubt had his share of difficult years before, but in political terms 2005 must go down as his worst year in office. His approval ratings had plummeted and are only now inching their way up the ladder. The political capital he sought to spend after his re-election has been squandered.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122505E.shtml

Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122505Y.shtml

NEDA is still working on our Ohio exit poll analysis which shows clearly that Ohio's exit polls are more than consistent with vote miscounts - if Ohio's exit poll discrepancies were caused by vote miscounts, they look very much like they were outcome-altering.

In other words, Ohio exit poll data is SCREAMING outcome-altering vote miscounts. However, the Ohio analysis is time consuming and tedious because

1. there is not one complete data set because Mitofsky did not release sample sizes with the Election Science Institute (ESI) data set, and the raw survey data he released to the U of Michigan does not include vote counts, so our data has to be hobbled together from two sources, and the analysis tried and tested in several ways, and

2. we are doing it manually in spreadsheets rather than with programs. this type of analysis is not easy to accomplish using spreadsheets.

In the future, now that we've devised the analysis, it could be programmed automatically and we recommend, and I believe candidates will agree after seeing the Ohio exit poll analysis, that no candidate should concede or be sworn into office without first obtaining and analyzing their election and exit poll data.

ANNOUNCEMENT - NEW! NEDA is today releasing a brief paper in rebuttal to Mark Lindeman of Bard College who wrote a recent essay supporting the shoddy invalid exit poll analyses of the Election Science Institute (ESI) and Mitofsky that were released in June and presented at the American Statistical Association conference in October.

This is YOUR little Xmas present from me, so don't say I never gave you anything. ;-)

http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-polls/ESI/Mark-Lindeman-Response.pdf

Please read this interesting paper (to me at least ;-) and pass it on, to any reputable mathematical department, or to a press person who would be willing to ask any reputable math department to evaluate it, including Bard's mathematics department, who can correctly evaluate their professor Lindeman's essay, ESI/Mitofsky's analysis, and NEDA's mathematical logic proof and inform us who is correct. If only we could get the press to cover this, it would correctly set the stage for our scientifically sound Ohio exit poll analysis that will be released soon.

NEDA has mathematically disproven Mitofsky's exit poll analysis! You'd think that the press might find that interesting, but then the media (NEP) is Mitofsky's biggest client, so perhaps that causes issues?

Kathy Dopp
http://uscountvotes.org

Originally Thirteen Techniques for Truth Suppression

by David Martin, author of America's Dreyfus Affair

Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party.

1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.
2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "how dare you?" gambit.
3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")
4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.
5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nut," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.
6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).
7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.
8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.
10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.
11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. For example: We have a completely free press. If they know of evidence that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing they would have reported it. They haven't reported it, so there was no prior knowledge by the BATF. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press that would report the leak.
12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. For example: If Vince Foster was murdered, who did it and why?
13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions.
14. Scantly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.
15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible-sounding, but anonymous, source.
16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges "expose" scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own money.
17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question, "What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine critics?" Don't the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.
18. http://www.dabney.com/wacomuseum/library/martin1.html


Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd
ICIS-Institute for Cooperation in Space
3339 West 41 Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6N3E5 CANADA
Tel: 604-733-8134
Fax: 604-733-8135
Email: peace@peaceinspace.org
Campaign: http://www.peaceinspace.org
Exopolitics: http://www.exopolitics.com
ICIS: http://www.peaceinspace.com
Click here to send a letter to the Canadian Parliamentary Leaders for public ET Hearings
http://www.peaceinspace.net

David Sirota
Sirotablog
12.20.05
WorkingforChange.com blog

Oh, you've been hearing it everytime you tune into politics: Democrats in Washington saying they are serious about taking back the House. And yes, we would all like to believe them. But there is, after all, one essential, minimal, base-level indicator to seriousness - whether Democrats will even bother to show up to vote on the most critical legislation. And all you had to do was look at the most critical vote of the year early yesterday morning to suddenly realize that Democrats might still be oh-so-comfy in the minority.

The vote was on the GOP budget bill - you remember, the one that newspapers note "cuts $39.7 billion from social-welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid and child-support collection." It passed by 6 votes. Why should we be asking Democrats questions about this vote when the House is controlled by Republicans? Well take a look at the official roll call and you'll see that 6 Democrats didn't show up to vote. They are:

Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA)
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL)
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA)
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX)
Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA)

Yes, you read that right - one of those missing six was Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) - the guy who heads up the Democrat's House campaign committee. You know, the committee that is supposed to be most seriously focused on developing a message and a record that helps Democrats win back the House in 2006. [...] Read the rest at Workingforchange.com: http://tinyurl.com/cye2x


© Virginia Metze

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 21, 2005
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact "international."

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

Vice President Dick Cheney entered the debate over the legality of the program on Tuesday, casting the program as part of the administration's efforts to assert broader presidential powers. [...] Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/e36fn


© Virginia Metze

The Democratic Party Blog
Posted by Tim Tagaris on December 20, 2005 at 09:12 AM
Anchorage Daily News:

The official vote results from the 2004 general election are riddled with mistakes and discrepancies, are impossible for the public to make sense of, and should be corrected as soon as possible, the Alaska Democratic Party says.

To most Alaskans, the election may seem like a long-done deal, something that concerns only political junkies, candidates and analysts. But questions have been swirling ever since the polls closed about how the results were tabulated and the reliability of the electronic voting machines, said Kay Brown, spokeswoman for the Democratic Party.

For instance, when district-by-district vote counts are totaled, President Bush received 292,267 votes, according to an analysis by the Democrats. But his official total was 190,889, a difference of more than 100,000 votes, according to the state Web site.
[...] Read more at http://tinyurl.com/72jkd


© Virginia Metze

AMERICAblog.com
by John in DC - 12/21/2005 10:01:00 AM

Bush said Democratic leaders endorsed his domestic spying program, and we're now finding out that those very same Dem leaders either weren't briefed at all on the program OR expressed their grave concern about it at the time. That hardly counts as "the Dems endorsed it."

Go Nancy! The following is Pelosi's press release:

Pelosi Requests Declassification of Her Letter on NSA Activities
Washington, D.C. -- House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on her request to the Director of National Intelligence to declassify a letter she wrote several years ago to the Bush Administration expressing concerns about the activities of the National Security Agency.

"When I learned several years ago that the National Security Agency had been authorized to conduct the activities that President Bush referred to in his December 17 radio address, I expressed my strong concerns in a classified letter to the Administration and later verbally.

"Today, in an effort to shed light on my concerns, I requested that the Director of National Intelligence quickly declassify my letter and the Administration's response to it and make them both available to the public. [...] Read the rest of her press release at http://tinyurl.com/9j7h9


© Virginia Metze

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005; Page A01

The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court

"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?" [...] Read it in the Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/adnxf Also reprinted in TruthOut: http://tinyurl.com/dfb5h


© Virginia Metze