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Dear friends,
Below are
one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you may have missed.
These news articles include revealing information on flawed electronic
voting machines in Ohio and California, a fabricated terror group in
Egypt,
the destroyed CIA torture tapes, and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim
from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link
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Key sentences are highlighted for those with limited
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Tod Fletcher and Fred Burks
for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines
FlawedDecember 15, 2007, New York
Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/us/15ohio.html
All five
voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung
two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could
undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report
commissioned
by the state’s top elections official has found. “It was worse than I
anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of
the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to
the
others.”
At polling stations, teams working on the study were able
to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug
false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to
introduce malignant software into servers. Ms. Brunner proposed replacing
all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen
ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to
use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper
ballots
that are filled in manually by voters. Florida, another swing state with a
history of voting problems, is also scrapping touch-screen machines and
switching to optical scan ones for the election. Such systems have gained
favor because experts say they are more reliable than others and, unlike
most touch screens, they provide a paper trail for recounts. The study
released Friday found that voting machines and central servers made by
Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly
Diebold; and Hart InterCivic were easily corrupted. The $1.9 million
federally financed study assembled corporate and academic teams to conduct
parallel assessments.
“All of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render
their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy
election,”
the team wrote.
Note:This article somehow fails to mention the fact that as these machines were
used in the 2004 presidential election, the results could easily have been
flawed. For a summary of many major media reports on the problems with
electronic voting machines, click here.
CIA Destroyed Tapes Despite Court
OrderDecember 12, 2007, New York
Times/Associated Presshttp://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-CIA-Videotapes-Courts.html
Federal
courts had prohibited the Bush administration from discarding evidence of
detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that
revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics. Normally, that would
force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But
the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.
While
judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried
to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the
CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the
time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system,
interrogation videos of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed. The CIA
destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry
H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all
evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of
detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay." U.S.
District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.
At
the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu
Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose
interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren't at Guantanamo
Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books -- and apparently
beyond the scope of the court's order. Attorneys say that might not
matter.
David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, ...
said
"It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence,
and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would
be relevant to pending litigation. It's logical to infer that the
documents
were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which
statements were obtained."Was Pelosi aware of CIA's
tactics?December 12, 2007, San Francisco
Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/12/EDR7TS7DI.DTL
When the
CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, were they also
destroying the truth about Sept. 11, 2001? After all, according to the
9/11
Commission report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day - and
the nature of the enemy in this war on terror that Bush launched in
response to the tragedy - comes from the CIA's account of what those
prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to
interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was forced to
rely on what the CIA was willing to relay instead. On the matter of the
existence of the tapes, we know the CIA deliberately lied.
Why
should we believe what we've been told about what may turn out to be the
most important transformative event in our nation's history? On the basis
of what the CIA claimed the tortured prisoners said, President Bush
launched ...
an endless war that threatens to bankrupt our society both financially and
morally. How important were those "key witnesses" to the 9/11
Commission report? Check out the disclaimer on page 146 about the
commission's sourcing of the main elements laid out in its narrative:
"Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al
Qaeda members ... Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses ...
is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of
intelligence reports. We submitted questions for use in the
interrogations,
but ... were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive
interrogation process." Videos were made of those "sensitive"
interrogations, which were accurately described as "torture" by one of the
agents involved, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Yet when
the
9/11 Commission and federal court judges specifically asked for such
tapes,
they were destroyed by the CIA, which then denied their existence.
Note:Author Robert Scheer goes on to ask what did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
and
other key Congressional Democrats know about the torture techniques used
by
the CIA, and when did they know it? For a powerful summary of many
major-media reports raising questions about what really happened on 9/11,
click here.
Egypt 'fabricated terror group'December 11, 2007, BBC Newshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7137950.stm
A
US-based human rights group has accused the Egyptian government of using
torture and false confessions in a high-profile anti-terrorism case.
Twenty-two alleged members of an unknown Islamist group, the Victorious
Sect, were accused of planning attacks on tourism sites and gas pipelines.
Human Rights Watch says its research suggests the security forces may have
fabricated the group's name. It reports claims the case was used to
justify
renewing emergency laws. The BBC's Ian Pannell in Cairo says this is just
the latest in a run of accusations by human rights organisations against
Egypt's police and state security apparatus. The authorities' claims made
headlines in April 2006 when they said they had smashed a previously
unheard-of terrorist group plotting a series of attacks against soft
targets including tourists and Coptic Christian clerics.
"Beyond
coerced confessions, there appears to be no compelling evidence to support
the government's dramatic claims," HRW says. "Indeed, it appears that SSI
(state security investigations) may have fabricated the allegations made
against at least some and possibly all of them," its report says.
Detainees quoted by HRW said they had been beaten and kicked by their
interrogators, and some were given electric shocks on their bodies,
including their genitals. A spokesperson for the organisation said the
case
was not unusual, but was part of a pattern of detention and torture by the
Egyptian security services in order to obtain false confessions. The
"Victorious Sect" arrests came to light shortly before Egypt renewed its
enduring and controversial emergency laws, which give sweeping powers of
detention to the security forces.
New solar systemsDecember 11, 2007, CNNhttp://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/10/fsummit.climate.solarpower/
Widespread
anxiety about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels, coupled with a
genuine fear that oil and gas will become scarce before the century ends
are fueling a renewed interest in renewable energy and, in particular,
solar power solutions. Research is increasingly focusing on 'concentrated
solar power' systems -- CSP for short. CSP systems focus direct solar
radiation through optical devices onto an area where a receiver is located
-- much like burning a hole in a piece of paper with a magnifying glass.
This solar radiation is then converted into electricity. In practice, the
CPS system comprises of four elements - a solar field, solar collector
elements, a solar receiver and ... the remaining systems required to
operate a power plant.
In Europe, a number of solar projects are
being rolled out. Germany leads the way with over 10 solar power plants.
Located in the Tabernas Desert in southern Spain, however, is the
Platforma
Solar de Almeria -- a solar power research facility where new solar
technologies are being tested. One of the concepts being trialed
is the 'central tower' configuration which utilizes a collection of
heliostats -- mirrors which automatically track sunlight -- which act as
solar collectors. The heliostats then concentrate the solar radiation onto
a central receiver located at the top of a tower. Europe's first
commercial
concentrated solar power plant was officially opened in Seville, Spain in
March 2007. The new Planta Solar 10 (PS10) is the first commercial solar
thermoelectric power plant in the world. 624 large heliostats focus the
sun's rays on to a single solar receiver 115 meters high. With
temperatures
reaching up to 250 degrees Celsius, the solar receiver then turns water
into steam, which in turn powers a turbine. It has a peak capacity of 11
MW
... enough to generate 23 million kWh of electricity per year. That's
enough to power 6,000 homes and save 18,000 tons of carbon emissions every
year.
Note:For other reports of exciting breakthrough developments in new energy
technologies, click
here.
Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S.,
Halliburton/KBRDecember 10, 2007, ABC Newshttp://abcnews.go.com/story?id=3977702
A
Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers
in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the
incident. Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by
multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under
guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left
Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job. "Don't plan on working
back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a
position
in Houston," Jones says she was told. In a lawsuit filed in federal court
against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held
in
the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR,
which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her
leave. Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her
a
cell phone so she could call her father in Texas. "I said, 'Dad, I've been
raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to
leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe,
R-Texas. "We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com,
"and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her
American employer. The State Department ... dispatched agents from the
U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the
container. According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers
who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both
physically and emotionally."
Over two years later, the Justice
Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In
fact,
ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.
Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face
a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left
contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.
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