Sunday, November 1, 2009
Re-Thinking Afghanistan
7:30 PM. Columbus Screening of Rethink Afghanistan. View Brave New Foundation’s recently released documentary directed by Robert Greenwald, director of Outfoxed, Wal-Mart: The High cost of Low Price, and Iraq for Sale. Sponsored by Community Organizing Center, Columbus Campaign for Arms Control, Middle East Peace Committee, Alternatives to Militarism Project. CONTACT: Mark Stansbery for more details.
Location: Old First Presbyterian Church, 1191 Bryden Road, Columbus, Ohio 43205
Phone: 252-9255
Email: walk@igc.org
Website: www.rethinkafghanistan.com
Archive for year: 2009
Written and Produced by Kevin Stocklin, directed by Gary Gasgarth
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
7:30pm – 10:00pm
Drexel East
2254 E Main St
Bexley, OH
Filmed over a twelve-month period, from Rochester, NY and Cleveland, to Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego, WE ALL FALL DOWN also shows how an out-of-control "mortgage machine" has today led to home foreclosures nationwide, featuring interviews with families who have been devastated, as loan defaults and evictions spread from the poor to middle-class sectors of the populace, in turn creating millions of abandoned and disintegrating properties in neighborhoods and cities throughout the U.S. Their emotionally moving stories reveal the all-too-real personal consequences for Americans caught up in this financial spiral.
Click Here for Complete Screening Information Available on the Festival Website
This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press, the Film Council of Greater Columbus and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund with the Drexel Theater.
Columbus International Film + Video Festival, Early Bird Festival Screening
“STRONG COFFEE”
October 20 – 7:00 – 8:00 PM.
Movie tells the story of Café Femenino-—a revolutionary idea that is helping people in need all over the world. Café Femenino beans are the first coffee beans grown entirely by women farmers. This film screening – co-sponsored by The Columbus International Film + Video Festival and Stauf’s.
Admission – $5.
Studio 35 Cinema & Draft House, 3055 Indianola Ave, Columbus, OH.
614-444-7460
http://www.chrisawards.org
After the movie, join us for a musical event:
We have a tremendous opportunity in Columbus, to hear
ANNE FEENEY – progressive singer/songwriter
ANNE FEENEY is a wonderful labor/feminist singer/songwriter in the Woody Guthrie mold (& there ain’t many of those)!! She is someone who doesn’t just write songs about the struggle for justice, she is there, on the picket lines, in the sit-downs, singing for the strikers, marching in the marches and standing up for what is just, regardless of the consequences.
Requested donation: $10.
In her only Columbus visit in many years, Anne will play at:
1021 E. BROAD ST, COLUMBUS, side door, parking in rear
October 20 – 7:30 pm.
253-2571
truth@freepress.org
http://www.annefeeney.com/
by Bob Fitrakis
Who is Dr. Larry James? A man who in his biography claims responsibility for “Fixing Hell.” Whose hell did he fix? Or did he look the other way while the Devil’s work was done?
Between 2003 and 2007, Army Colonel Larry James served as Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group and a senior member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). James’ job was advising on interrogation and “behavior management” for the men and kids at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. In 2004, he functioned as the director of the Behavioral Science Unit at the Abu Ghraib prison.
That’s right. His past includes both the notorious Gitmo and Abu Ghriab, the infamous torture site in Iraq.
Having retired from the U.S. Army, James is currently the Dean of the Professional Psychology Department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. James is licensed to practice psychology in Louisiana, Ohio, and Guam. Human rights advocates argue that Wright State is absolutely wrong in appointing James as Dean because of his questionable past.
Public records indicate that while James served at Gitmo in the spring of 2003, “…abuse and interrogations was widespread and cruel treatment was official policy,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The Center argued that James’ “conduct” at Gitmo should “warrant immediate investigation.”
“Detainee and government reports of abuse during the period of Dr. James’ first deployment include beatings, rape threats, religious and sexual humiliation and painful body positions,” the Center stated.
Under James’ tenure, Guantanamo developed and implemented the Camp Delta “Behavioral Management Plan.” The Plan called for treating new detainees in a way that would “enhance and exploit [their] disorientation and disorganization.” How was this accomplished? Prolonged periods of solitary confinement that are known to cause hallucinations, extreme anxiety, muscular atrophy, weight loss, and other physical conditions that may be irreversible, according to the Center.
While James has denied responsibility, his critics have charged that he used his access to confidential medical records of detainees to target their “physical and mental vulnerabilities.”
At the recent August American Psychological Association (APA) conference in Toronto, the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) handed out fliers with the headline: “Department of Defense Ensures Psychologists’ Collusion in Torture.” Larry James was singled out as one of the psychologists in question.
Both the CCIJ and the CCR called upon the Minister of Public Safety in Canada, Peter Van Loan, to investigate James’ for possible war crimes. They included an 8-page Appendix extensively foot-noted including numerous references to admissions from James’ book, “Fixing Hell.”
The Appendix points out that while James frequently claimed he was reforming things, his actual accounts show he either turned a blind eye to torture, or may have facilitated it.
On page 50-51 of “Fixing Hell,” James writes the following:
“I saw Luther and three MPs wrestling with a detainee on the floor. It was an awful sight. I wanted to run back to my room and wash my eyes with bleach. The detainee was naked except for the pink panties I had seen hanging on the door earlier. He also had lipstick and a wig on. The four men were holding the prisoner down and trying to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown, but he was fighting hard. My first instinct was to rush in and start barking orders at the men, demanding they stop this ridiculous and abusive wrestling match. But I managed to quell that urge and wait.”
James admitted he went to have a cup of coffee and then intervened to urge the interrogators to build better relations with the man being tortured. James writes: “I never once said anything about the lingerie or interrogation. My purpose was to build a relationship with Luther, rather than to attack him as being wrong or as a human being.”
Hell hath been fixed.
When another prisoner was being abused by large MPs screaming in his face for three hours straight, James once again “fixed” hell by suggesting they might want to offer him a drink or a bathroom break.
While James was at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, court records and affidavits indicate that prisoners were not only isolated, but their sleep cycles were deliberately disturbed, they were exposed to extremely hot and cold temperatures, forced to smell unpleasant odors and subject to “dietary manipulations.”
But what does that mean in practical terms? Allegations by one detainee claim that he went for 3-4 weeks without any solid food, living on Ensure and water. Reports by six other high-value detainees allege they were subject to the same liquid diets.
According to the Red Cross report, there was also the use of “prolonged diapering” to force the detainees to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were deprived of using a toilet. Six high-value detainees reported being repeatedly slammed against walls 20-30 times consecutively as an interrogation technique.
If James had the urge to go in and “bark orders” when confronting torture, he most likely had command authority over the torturers at Gitmo. Remember that the standard definition for torture is the deliberate infliction of physical or mental distress on detainees.
Under Canadian law, it is a war crime if any military personnel are found to be “committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”
Dr. Trudy Bond, a Toledo psychologist, filed an extensive complaint against James with the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists (LSBEP). Bond’s complaint specifically charged that James violated his ethical duties as a licensed psychologist to keep his patients from harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain their informed consent.
Bond filed her complaint on February 29, 2008. Within a month, the LSBEP chose not to investigate the matter. On June 19, 2008, Bond asked the Board to reconsider. In less than a week, the LSBEP reaffirmed their decision not to investigate.
Bond next turned to the courts, asking the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge to review the LSBEP’s decision on June 13, 2009. The Court ruled in favor of the Board. On August 6 of this year, Bond filed an appeal with the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals.
Bond has taken similar action in Ohio as well as with the American Psychological Association. On July 8, 2008, she filed a formal complaint against James with the Ohio State Board of Psychology for, among other things, that James’ conduct is an ethical violation because it “…substantially harmed or is likely to substantially harm a person.”
In her complaint to the American Psychological Association (APA), Bond cited the Report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published after their visit to Guantanamo. The Report documented behavior commonly regarded as torture prior to Bush and Cheney. The rest of the world still defines torture in the traditional sense.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has demanded that medical professionals including James be a “specific focus” of an investigation assessing whether the interrogations violated legal or medical ethics. Steven Reisner of PHR said, “The conclusions that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological practice.”
In a report issued by PHR in 2009, they categorically concluded, that “Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing, and providing justification for torture.”
While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have come out unequivocally against the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the APA has waffled on the issue.
In 2005, the APA’s Board endorsed the role of psychologists involved in interrogations as consistent with APA ethics, if it was done for the purpose of making the interrogations “safe, legal and effective.” In 2008, the APA passed another resolution against its members being present in any facility where U.S. and international law was being violated unless they were working for the benefit of the detainees.
James is at the center of this ongoing debate, and now so is Wright State University.
Whether James is qualified to be licensed in Ohio or to be a Dean at Wright State is probably best decided after a careful reading of “Fixing Hell.” One of the most telling passages from the book reads as follows: “Sex was a complicated factor in much of our work at Abu Ghraib. I came to know several single women at Abu Ghraib who got pregnant, received adverse legal action, and were sent home. Private Jenni Nelson was a short, fat, seriously ugly young lady. She looked as though she was crying all the time. Nevertheless, she got a boyfriend, got pregnant, and was promptly sent home by her company commander. Did she do it on purpose to get out of Abu Ghraib? Probably. And I’m sure she wasn’t the first.”
One wonders why Wright State University would hire a man as their Professional Psychology Department Dean who has so little sensitivity to Private Nelson, as well as the prinsoners he was charged to protect. The reality is Private Nelson took action to get out of Abu Ghrai, and not be charged with war crimes. James stayed and wrote a book insulting Nelson and covering-up crimes against humanity.
Was he fixing hell? Human rights advocates say he helped create it for his patients and they are doing everything to hold him accountable for his admitted actions. Bond is currently re-filing an ethics complaint against James in Ohio. There’s an ongoing campaign by the Center for Constitutional Rights called “When Healers Harm” demanding that we “hold health professionals accountable for torture.”
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the freepress.org and is the author of the forthcoming book, Cops, Coverups, and Corruption.
10/01/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
There’s a peculiar lawsuit pending in Franklin County: Fox Investigation, Inc. vs. Linda Leisure.
Linda Leisure first met death row inmates during her volunteer work as a prison minister in Ohio. Inspired by President Bush’s call for “volunteerism” she worked up the nerve to visit men she feared, yet wanted to help. Not unlike the Susan Sarandon character in Dead Man Walking, she listened to their stories and ministered to their needs.
One of those man’s needs, it turned out, involved helping the wife of death-row inmate John Spirko prove that her husband was not guilty. The Spirko case peaked Leisure’s interest in investigating murder cases. She felt her talents might be better used in ensuring that justice was being done in individual cases rather than preaching to the condemned. Leisure took a job with Fox Investigation, Inc., a private investigating firm headed by Richard H. Smith, an ex-Columbus police officer and an ex-investigator at the Ohio Public Defender’s Office (OPDO). Fox Investigation often did contract work for the OPDO investigating the cases of death row inmates.
Little did Leisure know the reasons why Smith was no longer a cop or state investigator. But she quickly found out why. Soon after going to work at Fox, Leisure claims that Smith “wanted me to falsify time records and interviews on these murder cases.” Appalled, she left Fox Investigation, convinced that certain death row inmates were being denied basic “due process” guaranteed them under the Constitution. And even more frightening, that as a result, some innocent American citizen might be executed. This spurred her into action.
On October 25, 1994 Leisure sent a letter to Common Pleas Judge James O’Grady outlining the above allegations against Smith. On November 14, Leisure voluntarily took and passed a polygraph exam substantiating her charges. But it was politics as usual in the Franklin County Courts and nobody took her accusations seriously, as Smith continued to do business.
Fortuitously, Leisure shared the same attorney as Chester “Briss” Craig, former deputy investigator at the OPDO. Craig informed her that he had been Smith’s boss at the OPDO and had complained to the Ohio Inspector General with similar concerns. In January 1992, Craig charged “…that some of the investigators were turning in false reports and were not providing the support services to the attorneys as required.” Leisure tracked down the state investigative report that essentially verified Craig’s allegations.
The report was none too kind to her old boss, Mr. Smith. During his tenure from April 1983 to November 1988 at the OPDO, Smith was fond of referring to black defendants as “niggers” and white ones as “scumbags.” These “niggers” and “scumbags” were the very clients Smith was hired to work for and investigate their claims of innocence.
Smith told several of his fellow investigators that he didn’t like “working for a nigger,” referring to Craig. Smith admitted in the report that he had arranged for police friends to arrest Deputy Director Craig on a drunk driving charge. “I don’t consider it a conspiracy at all. I was just going to let the man expose himself,” Smith said of Craig.
Speaking of exposing oneself, it turns out that Smith had been forced off the Columbus Police force for doing just that with his most private parts to seven different women, including five minors on October 9, 1981. He had previously been reprimanded many times for various acts of misconduct, including engaging in sex while on duty, and showing up drunk and threatening his ex-wife at her house.
Who was exposing who?
Leisure tried desperately to take the story to the press, with no luck. Depressed and nearly defeated, she picked up a copy of the now-defunct Columbus Free Press, which I edited at the time. She claims God spoke to her and told her that I would publish the story. Who was I to argue with God, particularly when he sends me such a hot story?
Anyway, Leisure’s story appeared on the cover of the January 1995 Free Press. Happy ending? Alas, hardly.
Leisure began to receive harassing and threatening phone calls; someone mailed drugs to her house; and Fox Investigation and Richard Smith sued Linda Leisure for $150,000 in damages due to his loss of reputation. Leisure’s been unable to hold a steady job and had to re-mortgage her home in order to pay an attorney.
After perusing Mr. Smith’s Columbus police files, Leisure’s attorney recently wrote to Smith’s attorney: “Quite frankly, after review of such file, I believe Mr. Smith would have great difficulty proving to a jury that any action by Miss Leisure caused damage to his reputation.” Standard legal principle: one must first have a reputation before it can be damaged.
Leisure was moved by the spirit, driven by her fund.
Drexel Theatres is pleased to announce the opening of the Award-Winning new film THE COVE, for a special limited engagement starting this Friday, October 9
In THE COVE, a crack team of divers and activists infiltrate a secret cove in Japan which is the largest supplier of dolphins in the world. Using disguised hi-def underwater cameras, specially made microphones and state-of-the-art covert techniques the team uncovers how a small seaside village serves as horrifying microcosm of the massive ecological crimes happening worldwide. Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
” VERY POWERFUL…. the footage is staggering! Passionate, exciting and frightening. ” –Roger Ebert
“RIVETING ….. a classic espionage tale!” – Peter Knegt, Indiewire
THE COVE starts Friday, October 9 at the Drexel Theatre, 2254 E. Main St. For more information, Showtimes and
Special Group Discount Ticket Information – contact Drexel Theatres at (614) 231-1050, (showtimes -614 231-9512) or
visit www.drexel.net.
Special Discount Offer: Save up to $8 on tickets to see THE COVE – See the attached
coupon or use coupon below….
——————————————————————
$2 OFF Any General Admission Ticket or $1 OFF any Matinee(before 6p.m.)
or Student/Senior Ticket. Coupon valid for up to 4 Discounted Tickets. Not valid Mondays
or any performance before 12 noon. Expires 10/22/09.
PRESENT THIS COUPON FOR ” THE COVE” TO THE DREXEL THEATRE , 2254 E. Main St.
SHOWTIMES – (614) 231-9512 or visit www.drexel.net
——————————————————————————————–
Saturday, October 10
6:30pm-midnight
Free Press Second Saturday Salon
Join progressive friends for food, drink, music, art, and a presentation by CURE-OHIO on:
– the insane over-incarceration in the U.S.
– some of the horrors of the Ohio prisons
– the Parole Board and old-law inmates
– the incredible racial and ethnic disproportion in incarceration
– and what you can do to help!
1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear
253-2571, truth@freepress.org
The level of the current right wing frenzy against the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) can only be understood within the dynamics of President Barack Obama’s 2008 election and John Kerry’s “official” loss in 2004.
ACORN, more than any other political organization, was responsible for Obama’s victory. ACORN in Ohio, and in key swing states, did what the Democratic Party used to do, but now seems incapable of doing – registering large numbers of low income and working class voters.
Instead of going after the real whores at Chase, CitiBank, and assorted other financial institutions that pimped our system and our people, undercover right wing videographers went for a target that fit their pre-fabricated agenda – a fake Daddy Mac and whore trying to open up a brothel with an ACORN member’s advice. Of course any ACORN people involved in illegal practices should be investigated, as should anyone in the elite financial community and anyone out there misusing federal Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money.
For that matter, the war criminals in the United States – beginning with Cheney and Bush who committed war crimes, violated the 4th and 8th Amendments by spying on U.S. citizens and torturing people – should be stalked and videotaped whenever possible.
The major reason ACORN has been a target of the Republican Party’s political operatives because it disrupts the strategy put in place by Karl Rove to simply purge as many Democratic voters as possible.
Here in Ohio, the Republican Party led a charge to purge an estimated 1.25 million voters. The GOP attacked black students at Wilberforce, a traditionally black college. They attacked inner city voters in the heavily Democratic wards of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. They attacked students at liberal colleges like Kenyon and students who had gone to major public universities like the Ohio State University and Ohio University.
ACORN was one of the few organizations that was consistently active in the inner city of Ohio’s largest urban areas. Not that there weren’t other voter registration organizations, including the Obama campaign, but the one that asked me to register to vote over and over again in the inner city neighborhood I live in was ACORN.
Recall that Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins and Western Missouri U.S. Attorney Todd Graves were fired for failing to go after ACORN during its 2006 voter registration drive. Those responsible for the firing reached all the way to Rove in Bush’s White House.
The National Journal reported that former Bush-Cheney re-election campaign attorney Mark “Thor” Hearne targeted ACORN: “[Hearne]…believed that the U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was not taking seriously allegations that ACORN workers were registering people who did not qualify to vote.”
The Republican sting operation is little more than an extension of the attacks on ACORN in Nevada, Missouri and Ohio in the 2006 election. In 2006, estimates were that ACORN had registered some 1.3 million new voters. The attacks on ACORN, and their contrived nature were revealed at a 2005 hearing before then-Congressman Bob Ney in Ohio, who was later convicted of a felony.
At the federal hearing held in the Ohio Statehouse, Hearne emerged from nowhere claiming to be a voting rights advocate with a front organization called the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). In a classic Rovian scam, Hearne unleashed an unsubstantiated litany of “voter fraud” charges against ACORN and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Among other things, Hearne, who had no history of ever working as a voting rights advocate, told Congressman Ney that voter registration campaigns were used crack cocaine as an incentive for registering new voters. Using the age-old canard of linking a black civil rights and a welfare rights organization with drugs serves the racist stereotypes consistently pitched by right-wingers.
In Hearne’s testimony in Ohio, he also went after the AFL-CIO and Americans Coming Together (ACT-Ohio) as evil-doers involved in “fraudulent” voter registration.
In a March 2005 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Hearne claimed there was “substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing by organizations such as Americans Coming Together, ACORN, and the NAACP-Project Vote.”
In Wood County, Ohio, the Free Enterprise Coalition (FEC) associated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed to back a racketeering charge against the NAACP. After Hearne’s showy press conferences, the suit was withdrawn following the revelation that the plaintiffs were being indemnified by the FEC.
The real issue is the emergence of long-standing southern Jim Crow tactics in key swing states like Ohio. In 2004, more than 300,000 voters were purged in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. In fact, 24.93% of all voters in the Cleveland area were purges between the 2000 and 2004 presidential election.
If the United States had universal guaranteed constitutional voting rights, ACORN would not be under attack by upper-class white political operatives posing as whores and pimps on their way up the Republican operative ladder.
The small amount of federal money received by ACORN pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars in unbid contracts given by Mac Daddys Bush and Cheney to Halliburton.
ACORN is under attack because it is effective and a threat to those forces who wish to disenfranchise millions of U.S. voters. For the most part, Democratic Party officials and their corporate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) mentors have long ago given up door-to-door inner city voter registration campaigns. ACORN remains as one of the last hold-outs in ensuring the voting rights of millions of forgotten and discarded urban voters.
Bob Fitrakis is the editor of freepress.org. While he’s never worked or been a member of ACORN, in the early 1980s he lived in a house in the city of Detroit that included ACORN organizers.
Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought
The ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg…
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2009
Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America’s electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America’s future with a few proprietary keystrokes.
ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.
Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.
But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.
For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.
And in fact, it’s even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t.
Let’s do a quick review:
- ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
- As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
- The source code on all U.S. touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines — including ES&S — are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;
- Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public’s inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
- With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
- Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;
- The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased “accidentally” by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.
Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.
Computer software “disappeared” 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.
In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).
Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in “recounting the vote” which confirmed the Bush “victory,” despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.
In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.
Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the “retail” level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the “wholesale” level with an electronic flip of a switch.
As it’s done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!
[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also appears, and where Bob’s Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]
September 22 at 7:30pm
Free Press free movie – “Children of Armageddon”
A moving and disturbing portrait of the legacy of the nuclear arms
race in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the
planet. With contributions from world-renowned experts Noam Chomsky,
Hans Blix, Arjun Makhijani, Douglas Roche and many others.
Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
Sponsored by the Free Press, Central Ohio Green Education Fund and the
Film Council of Greater Columbue
truth@freepress.org
I’m always amazed at the political career of Matt Damschroder, Deputy Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. He’s just been named to the bipartisan Committee to Modernize Voter Registration (CMVR). Matt first came to political prominence in Columbus when he managed the right wing “Flag Lady’s” campaign for City Council. The visibility of her little flag shop on High Street allowed her to do much better than expected in a close defeat.
Matt went on from there to be known as “the chauffer” – the guy who drove around and literally wheeled around former Franklin County Republican Party Chair Michael F. Colley. He went from being Colley’s wheel-man to replacing Colley as the Franklin County Republican Party Chair.
From there it was a short hop to the lucrative and politically powerful position as Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. In that post Damschroder came to national prominence during the infamous 2004 election. Readers of freepress.org will recall that Damschroder distinguished himself by purging “felons” that weren’t convicted of felonies from the voting rolls, particularly in Democratic strongholds, as well as shorting voting machines from the inner city black wards.
His partisan actions as Franklin County BOE Director cost John Kerry tens of thousands of votes in Ohio’s capital city. And when the bidding was opened for new voting machines in Franklin County, Damschroder accepted a $10,000 check in his BOE office made out to the Franklin County Republican Party from a key Diebold salesperson, Patsy Gallina. Damschroder was censured and suspended without pay for a month for this breach of ethics. His job was only saved thanks to the intervention of the Democratic Party’s ethically-challenged Chair, Bill Anthony. The philosophy at the Franklin County BOE is that an injury to one election official is an injury to all. Covering each other’s asses, and donkeys, is their code of honor.
Prior to the 2008 election, Damschroder purged more than 300,000 voters from Franklin County’s voting rolls – far exceeding any election official in the state of Ohio. And purging more voters in his county that were eliminated in 2004. Matt Damschroder was forced out by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner two days before the 2008 presidential primary. Damschroder had openly defied Brunner’s directives, particularly one mandating that voters be allowed to vote on paper. Damschroder hung on, as party hacks often do, as Deputy Director.
In a just society Damschroder would be busy repenting in prison. But in the United States, he gets promoted for his incompetence and corruption. Now Matt will be serving alongside former United Nations Ambassador and Senator John Danforth, former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former U.S. Reps Harold Ford, Jr. and Susan Molinari.
The goal of CMVR is to update the voting systems, particularly registration. A key charge to the Committee is to “…register voters automatically while also maintaining safeguards against fraud,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. I guess this is in the long tradition of hiring computer hackers for security and bank robbers as advisors to banks to prevent future thefts.
Ironically, the Columbus Dispatch seems to have missed the articles that contained Damschroder’s scandalous behavior. Mark Niquette, as is tradition, reports the Damschroder appointment as straight news as local boy makes good. Without a hint of sarcasm he writes “Matthew Damschroder is one of two local election officials on the bipartisan committee….”
I figure a few unethical debacles on this committee and Damschroder’s ready to lead the National Republican Party. After all, Rove’s retired, isn’t he?