63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read

by Jesse Ventura

  I cry out to stop the electronic ballots, because any computer can be hacked into, as evidence clearly shows. I say, stick with handwritten ballots. If you can’t fill in the blank circle with a pencil, then you shouldn’t be voting because we’ve been doing that since the first grade! Maybe the ballots still need to be hand-counted, but at least you’d have a paper trail.

  After persuing the emails, you’ll read a couple of pages from a report that CBS News prepared about the coverage of election night 2000—an apology, really, for going with the rest of the herd and calling the victory for Bush. This could be solved if something I’ve advocated was put in place, to allow no media coverage until the final polls close in Hawaii. Hell, they’re already predicting winners when it’s two o’clock in the afternoon in California. The polls are still open, but why do I need to go vote if I’m already told who’s going to be president? I suppose what I’m proposing infringes greatly on the First Amendment but what the heck, with all the documents you’re seeing in this book, what’s wrong with that?

  CBS NEWS COVERAGE OF ELECTION NIGHT 2000

  Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations

  Analysis of the Call for Bush

  The call was based entirely on the tabulated county vote. There were several data errors that were responsible for that mistake. The most egregious of the data errors has been well documented. Vote reports from Volusia County severely understated Gore’s actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were off by thousands. That precinct, Number 216, subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Gore’s total and added votes to Bush’s total. In addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore’s total by an additional 4,000 votes.

  The mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since there were only about 3 percent of the state’s precincts outstanding at this time. They incorrectly increased Bush’s lead in the tabulated vote from about 27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made. While the errors should have been caught by VNS and CBS News analysts through a comparison of VNS data with data from the AP or the Florida Secretary of State, VNS computers could also have had a more sophisticated program that would have constantly compared one set of numbers with the others and raised a warning signal. (Unlike the television networks, the Associated Press never called Florida for Bush, and, as we mentioned earlier, neither did VNS.)

  There was another problem: the VNS end-of-the-night model uses a straightforward projection of the number of precincts yet to report in each county. It assumes that the outstanding precincts in each county will be of average size and will vote in the same way as the precincts that have already reported from that county. However, at 2:17 AM there were more as-yet-uncounted votes than the model predicted. In fact, in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic area, there were three times as many votes yet to be reported as the model predicted. Some of that appears to be accounted for by the late release by county election officials of a large absentee vote.

  Conclusion

  As we have seen above, the first Florida call for Gore was probably unavoidable, given the current system of projecting winners. Early in the evening, the sample that VNS selected to represent voters statewide overestimated Gore’s lead, and a call was made for him. As the tabulated vote started accumulating, Gore lost his apparent lead, and a decision was made to take back the call. The ongoing VNS reviews have determined that the exit-poll sample of precincts in this election did not adequately represent the state. The exit-poll sample estimated a significant Gore lead that never materialized. That fact remained unknown until the actual vote count. The sampling data and exit polling did not take into account the 12 percent of the Florida vote that was cast by absentee ballot, which also affected the quality of the data. The CBS News Decision Desk could not have known about these problems.

  However, the second Florida call, the one for Bush, could have been avoided. It was based, as we have seen, on a combination of faulty tabulations entered into the total Florida vote, with an especially large error from Volusia County that exaggerated Bush’s lead. Later, in the early morning hours, reports from large precincts in Palm Beach were recorded, along with a surge of absentee ballots from that county. When the Volusia County numbers were corrected and the new numbers from Palm Beach taken into account, the Bush lead shrank, and a decision was made to take back the Bush call. The call might have been avoided, if there had been better communication between the CBS News Decision Desk and the CBS News studio and newsgathering operations, which had been reporting ballot irregularities and large numbers of potentially Democratic votes still outstanding, and if the VNS vote totals had been checked against the ones from the AP and the Florida Secretary of State’s Web site. The AP corrected the Volusia County error 35 minutes before VNS did, and one minute before CBS News made its call.

  And, despite all the understandable focus on the Florida calls, they were not the only mistaken calls of the night.

  38 & 39

  STOLEN 2004 ELECTION

  Fixing the Vote in Ohio

  Ohio, as everyone knows, was the state that put George W. Bush over the top in the 2004 election. A comfortable 118,000-plus vote official margin in Ohio gave him a victory over John Kerry and a second term as president. There were plenty of rumors that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had connived with the Bush people to fix the vote, but Kerry’s people were unwilling to pursue this too far.

  The story of what went on behind the scenes started to surface in a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in the summer of 2006. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Arnebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”

  The first document you’re going to read here is a deposition taken of Stephen Spoonamore, an expert in computer systems who knew plenty about how electronic voting machines can be manipulated. The company he refers to, Diebold, bought the GES outfit that was involved in the Florida debacle in 2000. And the fellow he mentions at the end, Mike Connell, was Karl Rove’s IT guy. Connell was involved in developing important parts of the computer network, including the election results reporting server systems. The second document is a contract with the Ohio secretany of state’s office, dated November 20, 2003.

  The Computer C “man in the middle” that Spoonamore is talking about was the property of a Chattanooga company called SMARTech. They were the subcontractor of GovTech Solutions, Mike Connell’s company, for purposes of hosting a “mirror site” on election night. This ensured that the Ohio election results could be observed and changed, using remote access through high-speed Internet.

  If this were the private sector and something got diverted to an intermediary in Chattanooga that was clearly illegal, there would be an investigation for sure. Why does this situation get a pass? Again, I call for handwritten ballots!

  The contract I mentioned that follows is somewhat complicated, but it’s back-up for what Spoonamore was talking about. Eventually Connell would most likely have talked about all this. Except that on December 19, 2008, Connell’s private single-engine plane crashed on the way back to his home in Akron. The man who could’ve blown the whistle on the biggest election fraud in American history was dead. I guess, as always, we’re supposed to attribute that to bad timing. Let me quote Colonel Fletcher Prouty again: “Nothing just happens, everything is planned.” If you’re interested in all the details, take a look at my previous book, American Conspiracies.

  40

  EMBASSY CABLES

  Hillary Clinton’s Call for Diplomats to Spy on the UN

  Who knew? Under Hillary Clinton, our State Department has been asking American diplomats around the world and at the UN to provide detailed technical information, including passwords and personal encryption keys, for communications networks used by UN officials. And we’re trying to
take down WikiLeaks and throw Julian Assange in the clinker for life? The hypocrisy, once again, boggles the mind.

  41

  PROTECTING CYBERSPACE

  An Internet “Kill Switch”?

  A bill—“Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010”—was introduced in the Senate last June by Joe Lieberman. Note particularly the part under section 4: “Authorizes the President to issue a declaration of a national cyber emergency to covered critical infrastructure.” Would this give Obama, or any future president, the right to basically pull a “kill switch” on the Internet? Could, say, a huge leak of classified documents serve as a justification?

  Because the bill is so long and convoluted, I only include part of it. Here also is a summary of the bill, written by the Congressional Research Service, a well-respected nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress.

  42

  MORE CYBERSECURITY

  Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Agreement with the Pentagon

  Then last October, Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Department reached an agreement “regarding cybersecurity” whereby they’re planning to synchronize their efforts. “We are building a new framework between our Departments to enhance operational coordination and joint program planning,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and DoD Secretary Robert Gates said in a joint statement. And in December, the United Nations was asked to consider global standards for policing the Internet, specifically in reaction to things like WikiLeaks. Now the Commerce Department is looking to create an Internet ID, under the label of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

  Maybe this is all somehow to the good, but it makes me a bit queasy. Honestly I see Homeland Security as our United States Gestapo, our federal police. It’s this simple, people: Government can’t allow anything to exist that it does not control. One time as governor I asked my staff to think about something on their lunch break: “Come back and tell me one thing in your life that the government doesn’t regulate or control.” Well, they couldn’t come up with anything. One person said, “Sleep.” You know how I responded? Not true—there’s a warning label on your mattress. Even what you lay down on has some stamp of government control.

  PART FOUR

  9/11

  43

  A NEW PEARL HARBOUR

  A Think Tank’s Anticipation of 9/11

  In case you’ve never heard of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), it was a D.C. think tank that existed for less than ten years (1997–2006) but had probably more influence on American lives than any similar organization before or since. The founders were two neo-cons, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, and from the get-go they were pushing for “regime change” in Iraq. They argued in an open letter to President Clinton that Saddam Hussein was out to stockpile Weapons of Mass Destruction and that an invasion of Iraq would be justified by his defiance of the UN’s “containment” policy.

  Then, in September 2000, a few months before George W. Bush became president, the PNAC published a ninety-page report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies and Resources for a New Century. It makes for instructive reading, given what’s happened since 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve excerpted four pages, and I’d ask you to pay particular attention to a statement made on the last one, which says: “…the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Anybody think September 11th might just have been that?

  The PNAC report seems like a complete game plan for the next decade, because for the most part it was followed. It should have been mandatory

  44

  9/11 WARNING I,

  FBI Knowledge of Terrorists Training at Flight Schools

  Two months before the events of September 11th, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams sent a memo to the bureau brass in D.C. and New York. The agent was warning about an unusually high number of Muslims being trained at American flight schools, perhaps part of “a coordinated effort” by Osama bin Laden. His memo was ignored at the higher levels.

  45

  9/11 WARNING II

  “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” Bush Was Told

  A little more than a month before 9/11, the Bush White House received an intelligence digest from the CIA with a two-page section titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The president headed off for a month’s vacation to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, right after that.

  What these warnings—and there were others—tell me is that (a) either the Bush Administration allowed 9/11 to happen; (b) took part in it happening, or (c) were the most inept administration we’ve ever had. These warnings were so plain and simple that, if you didn’t “get” them, you’d never win on Jeff Foxworthy’s show Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

  46

  A CHANGE OF POLICY

  The Pentagon’s “Stand Down Order” on 9/11

  The question that’s haunted me from day one is how come the world’s biggest military superpower was somehow oblivious to rogue airliners in American air space for more than an hour, and our top brass seemed so befuddled in terms of dealing with hijackers apparently using these four planes as flying bombs. Why couldn’t our fighter jets intercept at least one of them?!

  Well, here’s one possible explanation: Donald Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, never gave the go-ahead. Why? On June 1, 2001, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a new Instruction—superseding one from 1997—that required approval by the Secretary of Defense for any “potentially lethal support…in the event of an aircraft piracy (hijacking).”

  I sure would like to know why the question of Rumsfeld doing this never came up with the 9/11 Commission. Doesn’t it seem important to have asked why that critical policy got changed only four months beforehand?

  47

  CONTROLLED DEMOLITION

  The “Free Fall” of Building 7

  The third skyscraper that got reduced to rubble on 9/11 was the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which went down late that afternoon. According to the government, the reason was fires caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers. What I wondered about from the front was, how come fires had never before destroyed a steel skyscraper?

  The document you’re about to read sure makes it look to me like Building 7 was brought down by demolition charges from within. This comes from the final report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, which looked into the 6.5-second plunge (a few tenths of a second longer than it’s said Oswald fired those three shots at JFK).

  Here’s the rub: Building 7 came down so fast that it was at virtually the same rate as a free-falling object. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been pointing this out for years. But that didn’t jive with the official story, because free fall can only take place when an object has no structural components below it. And the only way that could happen to a building would be to remove the lower structural components with an external force like explosives. Otherwise, you’d be defying Newton’s laws of physics.

  So, not surprisingly, when the NIST Draft for Public Comment report came out in August of 2008, they claimed that the time it took for the 17 upper floors to crumble (the only floors visible on the videos they were using) “was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time and was consistent with physical principles.” There had been “a sequence of structural failures,” the NIST technical expert said.

  I guess they weren’t counting on a high school physics teacher named David Chandler asking a question at the briefing. The teacher said this “40 percent longer” business contradicted an Internet-available video that clearly showed “for about two and a half seconds…the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from free fall.”

  NIST apparently took the teacher seriously. In their final report, published in November 2008, amazingly enough they admitted free fall. After dividing the descent of Building 7 int
o three stages, NIST called the second phase “a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25s[econds].”

  A miracle apparently took place on 9/11. Like schoolteacher Chandler said, “Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion.” Interestingly, the final NIST report no longer said anything about its analysis being “consistent with physical principles.” Of course, they didn’t admit anything about a professional demolition job either. But that’s the only way this could have happened. Building 7 didn’t come down because heat from fires caused the steel to weaken and collapse. It was assisted to the ground by some type of explosive device that could remove all resistance.