Posts

Bob Fitrakis
September 13, 2012

As a direct result of the illegal United States-led attack on Gaddafi and the subsequent coup, pan-Islamic fundamentalists killed the U.S. ambassador and three other American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya Tuesday, on the anniversary of 9/11. As anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan recently noted, “Libya today is the creation of the U.S., NATO, and Al Qaeda, acting in a criminal partnership.”

The Obama administration referred to their efforts that led to the unleashing of al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists in Libya as a “kinetic humanitarian action.” In reality, it was regime change, a hi-jacking of resources, and an illegal war.

Libya, under Gaddafi, was stable. Gaddafi had nationalized Libyan oil resources and his nation had one of the highest standards of living in Africa and in the Middle East. At the time he was overthrown by the U.S.-led coalition, he was busy promoting an African currency and a continental development bank to liberate all the natural resources of Africa from the International Monetary Fund. In fact, Gaddafi bragged that he was the first state leader to issue an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden.

When the disorganized group of Islamic fundamentalists first rose up in Benghazi, it was the U.S. and NATO who provided legitimacy and aided in the organization of the Transitional Council. One of the first things that the Council did, was seize Libya’s central bank which controlled an estimated 144 tons of gold.

Libya was plunged into chaos through Obama and NATO’s actions. While the U.S. and other Western mainstream corporate media savagely denounced Gaddafi, they conveniently ignored the obvious al Qaeda operatives that would come forward after his removal.

We could pretend that the current crisis in Libya is simply the unintended and unpredictable consequences of a humanitarian intervention. What we would have to do is ignore the facts. Almost a year ago, ABC News reported that former Gaddafi regime hand-held missiles were popping up at Egyptian bazaars and that the going price for a heat-seeking shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile had dropped from $10,000 to $4,000. ABC later reported that out of the estimated 20,000 portable surface-to-air missiles in Gaddafi’s arsenal, 15,000 were missing.

The CIA has a term for unintended consequences — “blowblack.” That term has no application in the current Libyan crisis. Blowback implies that results are unintended. A much better thesis is provided by former high-ranking CIA official John Stockwell, who in his book In Search of Enemies, offers the perspective that the U.S. military industrial complex and its cohorts in the security industrial agencies intentionally keep the third world in chaos and turmoil to justify their unprecedented budgets.

Amidst this predictable chaos, it is much easier for the former colonialist nations of NATO to extract 144 tons of gold and vast oil and gas reserve from the once independent nation of Libya, now a haven for Islamic terrorists.


Bob Fitrakis was part of Cynthia McKinney’s group visiting Libya in 2009 for the Conference on the Study of the Green Book, and was in Gaddafi’s tent. See Bob’s article from earlier this year on Libya at Article

Bob Fitrakis

Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging
June 14, 2012

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called “recorded vote.” In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

When I took Ph.D. statistics to secure my doctorate in political science, we were taught to work through the rubric, sometime referred to as HISMISTER. The “H” stood for an explanation of the discrepancy rooted in some historical intervention, such as one of the candidates being caught in a public restroom with his pants down and a “wide stance” soliciting an undercover cop. The “I” that came next suggested we should check our instrumentation, that is, are the devices adequately reporting the data?

Here’s where U.S. elections become laughable. A couple of private companies, count our votes with secret proprietary hardware and software, the most notable being ES&S. Every standard of election transparency is routinely violated in the U.S. electronic version of faith-based voting. How the corporate-dominated media deals with the issue is by “adjusting the exit polls.” They simply assume the recorded vote on easily hacked and programmed private machines are correct and that the international gold standard for detecting election fraud – exit polls – must be wrong.

They are not going to go through the rest of the acronym and check to see if the Sample makes sense, that the right Measurements are being taken, or whether or not there’s been a breakdown in Implementing the exit polling. They won’t check to see if the representative Size of the polling numbers are accurate, or if there are problems with the pollster’s Technique, or if there was human Error, or if there’s just bad Recording going on.

Of course, the machines could be recording wrong because they are programmed for an incorrect outcome. The easiest people to convince regarding the absurdity of electronic voting with private proprietary hardware and software are the computer programmers across the political spectrum. Statisticians and mathematicians also readily comprehend the obvious nature of rigged elections.

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift” occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

In Charnin’s analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within a statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 state elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 state presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening?

“One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion,” said Charnin.

More proof of Republican operatives and sympathizers is found in the fact that 132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

Say you have a fair coin to flip. We would expect that if we flip that coin there would be an even split between heads and tails – or in this case, Republicans and Democrats. Election results falling outside the margin of error should be equally split between both parties. Yet, only five times, less than expected, did the extra votes fall in the direction of the Democratic Party.

So what are the odds? According to Charnin, of 132 out of 300 state presidential elections exceeding the margin of error in the direction of the Republicans – one in 600 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

The corporate-owned media does not want to mention that the problems with the exit polls began with the ascendancy of the former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush to the presidency in 1988. It is also that year when the non-transparent push-and-pray voting machines were introduced in the New Hampshire primary by Bush ally John Sununu. Bush, who rigged elections for the CIA throughout the Third World did unexpectedly well where the voting machines were brought in.

In any other election outside the U.S., the U.S. State Department would condemn the use of the these highly riggable machines based on the discrepancy in the exit polls. It’s predictable what would happen if an anti-U.S. KGB agent in some former Soviet Central Asian republic picked up an unexplained 5% of the votes at odds with the exit polls. A new election would be called for, as it was in the Ukraine in 2004. We would not have accepted the reported vote from the corrupt intelligence officer.

The CIA Director’s son wins with laughable exit poll discrepancies in 2000 and 2004 and the mainstream media sees no evil. The media’s perspective is to discredit the exit polls, which they sponsor, and call any who point to the polls “conspiracy theorists.”

In 2004, 22 states had a red shift to the CIA Director’s son, George W. Bush. Usually such improbably results are signs of a Banana Republic. Now we have a too-close-to-call neck and neck recall race in Wisconsin that show an obvious red shift for a right-wing red governor. Nobody wants to look at the non-transparent black box machines. Electronic election rigging has prospered. Long live the “adjusted” vote totals.


Originally published by The Free Press, https://freepress.org