by Tony Pugh
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether a speech by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond last summer that criticized the Bush administration violated a federal law that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from engaging in most forms of political activity.

Bond said he felt the probe was politically motivated and meant to have a chilling effect on the NAACP, in particular its efforts to register black voters, who support Sen. John Kerry overwhelmingly.

Bond is wrong, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said.

“The IRS follows strict procedures involving the selection of tax-exempt organizations for audit and resolution of any complaints about such groups,” Everson said. “Career civil servants, not political appointees, make these decisions in a fair, impartial manner.”

In a letter outlining the alleged violations, the IRS cited a federal law that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations “from intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.”

Bond, in a speech in July at the civil rights group’s convention in Philadelphia, declared: “The election this fall is a contest between two widely disparate views of who we are and what we believe.

“One view wants to march us backward through history — surrendering control of government to special interests, weakening democracy, giving religion veto power over science, curtailing civil liberties, despoiling the environment.

“The other view promises expanded democracy and giving the people, not plutocrats, control over their government.”

Frances Hill, a University of Miami law professor and an expert on the political rights of tax-exempt organizations, read Bond’s speech and said it was indeed critical of President George W. Bush. But she added that Bond was probably on safe legal ground because his speech was broadly conceived, didn’t focus solely on Bush and touched on a range of issues that have long been trademarks of the NAACP, such as equality and justice.

“You can be passionate and still have a tax-exempt status,” Hill said. “If the IRS thinks that this speech is sufficient to trigger an audit, then I think we have quite a new standard and they must be planning to audit hundreds of other groups.”

Full Article: newsday.com

by Bill Draper
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – At least 20 newspapers are objecting to Saturday’s “Doonesbury” comic strip because it features a profanity, uttered in the strip by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Editors told Universal Press Syndicate, the comic strip’s distributor, that if their reporters aren’t allowed to use profanity in stories, they don’t think “Doonesbury” should, either.

In Garry Trudeau’s comic, the voice of Cheney directs a caricature of President George Bush to tell a reporter to “go f— himself.”

A spokesman for Kansas City-based Universal Press Syndicate said at least 20 newspapers have contacted the company to complain about the cartoon for Saturday editions.

“In this particular instance, we have a strip known for strong political satire,” said Lee Salem, editor at Universal Press. “In this case, as in many prior instances, we assume editors will make the decision on the local level whether they use it or not.”

The comic plays off two controversies. In June, Cheney directed a similar profane comment at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy during a confrontation on the Senate floor while members were having their annual group picture taken.

The strip also refers to questions about a mysterious bulge in Bush’s suit jacket during a recent presidential debate. Some have speculated that the bulge was an audio receiver and that the president was getting messages passed to him. The White House and others have laughed off that suggestion.

In the strip, Cheney’s voice is coming into Bush’s ear.

Full Article: guardian.co.uk

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 28 – Ohio was a confusing patchwork of litigation and election board hearings on Thursday as Democratic and Republican lawyers waged courtroom battles from Cincinnati to Newark, N.J., over the rights of tens of thousands of Ohioans to cast ballots next week.

At the heart of the legal jousting was an effort by the state Republican Party to challenge 23,000 new voter registrations in 62 counties. On Wednesday, Judge Susan J. Dlott of Federal District Court in Cincinnati temporarily blocked hearings for those challenges in six counties, including the state’s two largest, Cuyahoga and Franklin.

But on Thursday, Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, and the Franklin County Board of Elections appealed Judge Dlott’s order, seeking to proceed with hearings on Friday and through the weekend.

Election officials in Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland and where 17,000 challenges have been filed, said they might have run out of time to hold hearings. But officials in Franklin County, which includes Columbus, said they might proceed with hearings on Sunday if their appeal succeeds. Many smaller counties were also proceeding with plans for hearings.

Full Article: nytimes.com

LONDON (Reuters) – Iraq has become a magnet for foreign terrorists since the U.S.-led invasion last year and there are not enough troops to cope, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain said on Thursday.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi spy master, said a fragmentation of Iraq would pose a major threat to world peace.

The invasion in March 2003 and subsequent disbanding of the Iraqi security services had opened up a void into which militants were flooding, he told Reuters in an interview.

“Iraq is a magnet for terrorists. The invasion has definitely not met the expectations of President Bush that it would be an end to terrorism in our part of the world,” said Prince Turki.

“There are just not enough security forces on the ground to meet the needs of the situation,” he said.

“Centrifugal forces have increased in Iraq. Fragmentation would be detrimental not just to Saudi Arabia but first of all to the Iraqi people, secondly to all of the neighboring countries and thirdly to the world community.”

Prince Turki, who has been ambassador to Britain for just under two years, said far more troops were needed in Iraq but declined to give a figure.

Full Article: Reuters

US vice-president mired in claims of bribery and corruption against his former company in four countries

by David Leigh, Rob Evans, David Pallister, and David Teather
British authorities have opened a new front in the widening investigation into allegations of bribery at Halliburton, the American oil services business, while it was being run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney.

The Guardian has learned that the Serious Fraud Office has joined the international effort at the request of the US Department of Justice in Washington. French and Nigerian officials are already involved in the inquiry.

Halliburton has become a political liability for the Bush administration as the US prepares to vote in presidential elections next week.

The company, one of the chief government contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been dogged by controversy, which includes claims of White House favouritism in awarding the firm billions of dollars of contracts without being forced to bid and Pentagon allegations that the firm has massively overcharged for its work.

It emerged late on Thursday that the FBI had launched an inquiry into how Halliburton secured contracts in Iraq, so far worth almost $9bn (£4.9bn).

Full Article:guardian.co.uk

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) – A key U.S. anti-terrorism law threatens the privacy of Canadians and rigorous steps are needed to protect private medical and financial information, a government study said on Friday.

Current safeguards are not sufficient to prevent the FBI from using the USA Patriot Act to force U.S. firms and their foreign subsidiaries to turn over private data even if doing so violates Canadian law, the province of British Columbia’s privacy commissioner said.

Full Article: Reuters

videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.

The question of whether the material was removed by Mr. Hussein’s forces in the days before the invasion, or looted later because it was unguarded, has become a heated dispute on the campaign trail, with Senator John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence, and Mr. Bush saying it is unclear when the material disappeared and rejecting what he calls Mr. Kerry’s “wild charges.”

Full Article:nytimes.com

U.S. Team Took 250 Tons of Iraqi Munitions
WASHINGTON — A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday to say a team from his 3rd Infantry Division took about 250 tons of munitions and other material from the Al-Qaqaa (search) arms-storage facility soon after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell in April 2003.

Explosives were part of the load taken by the team, but Major Austin Pearson was unable to say what percentage they accounted for. The material was then destroyed, he said.

The Pentagon believes the disclosure helps explain what happened to 377 tons of high explosives that the International Atomic Energy Agency said disappeared after the U.S.-led invasion.

Full Article:foxnews.com

Really now. How convenient.

LONDON – Deaths of Iraqis have soared to 100,000 above normal since the Iraq war mainly due violence and many of the victims have been women and children, public health experts from the United States said Thursday.

“Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland said in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

“Violence accounted for most of the excess death and air strikes from (U.S.-led) coalition forces accounted for the most violent deaths,” the report added.

The new figures, based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq, are much higher than earlier estimates based on think tank and media sources which put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370.

By comparison 848 U.S. military were killed in combat or attacks and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting, according to the Pentagon.

“The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than in the period before the war,” Les Roberts and his colleagues said in the report which compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it.

He added that violent deaths were widespread and were mainly attributed to coalition forces.

“Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children,” Roberts added.

commondreams.org

by Greg Palast
Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes “spoil” votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters.

Excerpted from the current (November) issue of Harper’s Magazine

To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. “Some voters are strange,” Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.

“So, if you ran the ‘blank’ ballots through a few more times, we’d have a different president,” I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.

So it was throughout the state—in certain precincts, at least. In Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted, rejected as either an ‘under-vote’ (a blank ballot) or ‘over-vote’ (a ballot with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents are African-American; ballots that did make the count went four to one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes were “spoiled” (i.e., cast but not counted) in the 2000 election in Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched the ballots with census stats and estimated that 54 percent of all the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white voter by 900 percent.

Votes don’t “spoil” because they are left out of the fridge. Vote spoilage, at root, is a class problem. Just as poor and minority districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they are stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County (Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white, wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in mostly-white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In the black county, absent such “second-chance” equipment, any error would void a vote.

The best solution for vote spoilage, whether from blank ballots or from hanging chads, is Leon County’s: paper ballots, together with scanners in the voting booths. In fact, this is precisely what Governor Bush’s own experts recommended in 2001 for the entire state. His Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, appointed by the Governor to sooth public distrust after the 2000 race, chose paper ballots with scanners over the trendier option — the touchscreen computer.

Full Article: commondreams.org

by Andrew Mills
Seymour Hersh’s biggest fear is that George W. Bush is going to win Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election. But he’s also hoping that if John Kerry prevails, he won’t try to win a war in Iraq that simply can’t be won.

“This war’s out of control. It’s not winnable,” Hersh said in Toronto yesterday. “The jet fuel that runs the insurgency is us. As long as we’re there, nothing is going to happen.”

In May, the celebrated investigative reporter was first to expose details of the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in a string of New Yorker stories, a feat that bookends a career that took off in 1969 when he exposed the story of American troops who massacred several hundred Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

For that, he won the Pulitzer Prize.

If Bush is re-elected, Hersh said, he will continue the war no matter the cost, no matter how many Americans or Iraqis are killed.

“Whether it’s through karma or a crusade or divine intervention, whatever reason, for his father even, if re-elected he’s going to continue the war,” Hersh said.

“This man did not go to war for oil, for Israel. He went to war because he really believes that he can get democracy going in Iraq. It might take five years, 10 years, I’ve heard people say longer.

“His only option is to increase the bombing to keep the unpopular, unelectable (Iraqi) government in power. He’s going to bomb and bomb and bomb and bomb.”

If there is a second Bush term, Hersh believes European countries — spurred by large and increasingly radical Muslim populations at home and the fact that they are 5,000 kilometres closer to Iraq than the United States is — will band together to be more opposed to American policy than they already are.

“And I think you’re going to see even the Germans say it’s time to remove the United States as the sole interlocutor between Israel and the Palestinians,” Hersh said.

And while he’s betting on Kerry as “the only option,” Hersh hopes the Democratic candidate won’t try to win the war.

In recent stump speeches, Kerry has said he plans to win in Iraq by increasing the role of U.S. special forces and improving the Iraqi military and police, which Hersh dismisses as an impossibility.

“If you want to solve the war, you’ve got to talk to the insurgents, the Baathists and the Shiites,” Hersh said.

Unless Kerry does this — which Hersh admitted will be politically difficult in a Washington that has vowed not to negotiate with terrorists — the insurgency will continue.

Full Article: commondreams.org