Greg Palast: Armed Madhouse

[KNOWTHIS]

I have a feeling this is going to be an important read!

I understand that whether or not Kerry won is irrelevant because he & Bush were one in the same. But still, if we're ever going to elect a real candidate if we can somehow get one nominated sometime in the future these elections must be reformed. We have no Democracy without that taking place. But that's just one of a large number of issues that Palast explores in this book.

Armed Madhouse : Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08,No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of th (Hardcover) by Greg Palast

Book Description
Palast’s old-style gum-shoe detective work to dig out the info on the War on Terror, greed- dripping schemes to seize little nations with lots of oil, the hidden program to steal the 2008 election, and the media biases that keep it unreported are the meat and bones of this BBC television reporter’s new book. Armed Madhouse is illustrated with dozens of documents marked "secret" and "confidential" that have walked out of file cabinets and fallen into Palast’s hands.

You won’t find Palast in The New York Times (except its bestseller list), but you will read his reports on the hottest Web sites worldwide, hear him regularly on Air America and the Pacifica radio networks, and see his stories reappearing as the basis for Eminem’s hit video "Mosh," Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and sampled by a dozen of today’s top platinum rock artists.

www.gregpalast.com/

For the past two years, I've nearly disappeared from BBC Television screens and from newspapers so my team could focus on our most important investigation yet. I've put it in a book: Armed Madhouse. The book travels from Beijing to New Orleans to Caracas to Baghdad to New Mexico ... a five-part investigation of global economic piggery so deep, dark and devious you just have to scream or cry -- or laugh.

Don't be fooled by the fact that 'Armed Madhouse' is entertaining -- this is my most serious reporting yet -- connecting oil panic, Hurricane Katrina, Chinese currency, Venezuela's petrodollars, disappearing ballots, Thomas Friedman, more oil, and the murder of General Motors. These are dispatches from the front lines of the class war.

There are five sections.

THE NETWORK: The World as a Company Town. The weird and frightening facts about the tidal flow of international currency -- the real story of China's rise and the death of Detroit. Plus a report from the future on the assassination of Hugo Chavez -- and explain why it had to be done.

THE CON: Kerry Won -- but two million of his votes were never counted. They can't take away your Social Security until they take away your vote. In the 2008 race, four million ballots will go missing. Here's how it will be done.

THE FEAR: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? Turning Ground Zero into a Profit Center. Why does Southold, New York, have machine guns on SUVs at the casino ferry? Investigations of health insurance and suicide bombings -- in other words, the fun chapter.

THE FLOW: Trillion Dollar Babies. If you thought George Bush had a secret plan to seize Iraq's oil -- you're wrong. He had TWO plans, and Armed Madhouse has both of them.

THE CLASS WAR: I go deeper into George Bush's crude system of educational terror ("No Child's Behind Left"), Ken Lay's REAL crimes for which he won't be tried and the story of New Orleans you won't get on Fox Snews. Here you'll get some complex economics and a free ticket to the circus -- and the core issue of the book: the war of the movers and shakers against the moved and shaken.

I'm asked again and again, What can we DO? The answer is, we can't do anything until we're INFORMED. We can't prevent the theft of the '08 election until you know the crazy details of the theft of '04. We can't stop the coming war in Venezuela until we learn the weird story of how Big Oil mapped out Iraq's petroleum destiny. We can't shield ourselves from economic onslaught until we have the hard, if hidden, facts of class conflict from the Sino-dollar panic to the privatization of hurricane planning. That's why I wrote this book.

[Swamp Gas]

And then you have Hillary Clinton saying Bush is not doing enough to stop Iran. They are all puppets of the Zionists.

What a horrible choice in 2008. Hillary vs either Giuliani, Jeb Bush, or Condi Rice. Every one of them Military-Industrialists. WHat is the real shame is all of the Liberals and Democrats who will be fooled by Hillary.

[KNOWTHIS]

Rupert Murdoch is endorsing Hillary & Hillary offers praise to Bush.

www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=294110&sid=WOR

Hillary praises Bush to the skies

Washington, May 10: Asked to say one nice thing about President George W Bush, Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton went one better: she named two things.

"He is someone who has a lot of charm and charisma, and I think in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was very grateful to him for his support for New York," Clinton said last night during a talk at the national archives about her life in politics.

Clinton, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, said that despite their "many disagreements about many, many issues," she has always had a good personal relationship with the President.

"He's been very willing to talk. He's been affable. He's been good company," said Clinton, a New York Democrat.

The junior Senator from New York, who is up for re-election this year, said she is still thankful for Bush's personal commitment to helping rebuild lower Manhattan after Sept 11, 2001.

She recalled how the President, in the grim days that followed the terror attacks, pledged in a private meeting with New York lawmakers to help rebuild the shattered city.

"It was a very personal, very emotional discussion and when we asked him for the help that New York needed he immediately said yes," said Clinton.

At that meeting, Bush pledged more than USD 20 billion in aid and tax incentives. Some New York Democrats have since charged the Bush administration has fallen billions of dollars short of that goal because some of the programmes were underused, but Clinton said the President kept his promise.

Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton

To call them a political odd couple would be a rash understatement.

Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch will host a fundraiser for liberal New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Financial Times reports.

The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months. Clinton set political tongues to wagging last month by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch.

The Financial Times quoted one unnamed source as describing the Clinton-Murdoch connection in this way: "They have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York. I wouldn't say it was illustrative of a close ongoing relationship. It is not like they are dining out together."

The fundraiser will take place in July, the newspaper said. Clinton is the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, though she has not indicated whether or not she will run.

Clinton has worked hard to take the edge off her reputation as a card-carrying liberal. She has has collaborated with congressional conservatives on some peices of legislation, called for a "common ground" on abortion and cut a political figure some on the left see as decidedly un-liberal.

Clinton, who made her debut in the Senate Armed Services Committee four years ago, has never voted against any major Iraq military spending legislation. She has also taken two high-profile trips to Iraq – journeys that may have helped to strengthen the credentials of a senator with no military background or experience.

Clinton, who says she’s "always been a praying person," has moved into the territory John Edwards had hoped to claim as the moderate Democrat who cares about the average American.

Hillary on Free Trade:

"you can't legislate reality"

[KNOWTHIS]

THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
by Greg Palast
For Buzzflash
Friday, May 12, 2006

I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

********************
For the full story, see "Double Cheese With Fear," in Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." ********************

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.

I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.

It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.

But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.

And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.


**********
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.

For more horror and humor from the War on Terror, listen to an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Armed Madhouse, "Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?

[Swamp Gas]

Bloomberg and Pataki both want to collect DNA from all criminals, even if they are not violent.

www.nyc.gov/portal/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID=c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c701c789a0&epi_menuID=13ecbf46556241d3daf2f1c701c789a0&epi_baseMenuID=27579af732d48f86a62fa24601c789a0&pageID=mayor_press_release&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fhtml%2F2006a%2Fpr138-06.html&cc=unused1978&rc=1194&ndi=1


MAYOR BLOOMBERG, POLICE COMMISSIONER KELLY, DISTRICT ATTORNEYS AND SEXUAL ASSAULT VICTIMS URGE STATE LEGISLATURE TO PASS THE NATION'S FIRST LAW MANDATING THE COLLECTION OF DNA SAMPLES FROM ALL CONVICTED CRIMINALS

New York State Would Be First to Require DNA Samples from All Convicted Criminals - 43 States Have Laws Mandating DNA Samples from All Convicted Felons

Current New York State DNA Databank Law is One of the Country's Weakest With Less Than Half of All Convicted Felons Required to Give DNA Samples

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today called upon the State Legislature to pass legislation that would require all convicted criminals to provide DNA samples for inclusion in the State DNA Databank. Currently, New York State has one of the weakest DNA Databank laws in the country and is one of only seven states that does not require DNA samples from all convicted felons. Pending legislation - if enacted - would make New York the first state in the country to require all convicted felons and misdemeanor offenders to provide DNA samples, adding an estimated 80,000 profiles to the Databank each year. The DNA legislation, also supported by Governor George Pataki, was passed in the State Senate in February and is currently pending in the State Assembly.

The Mayor was joined by Isa Cekic and Debbie Smith, both of whom were rape victims and are advocates for DNA Databank legislation, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Criminal Justice Coordinator John Feinblatt, Chief Medical Examiner Charles S. Hirsch, Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel M. Donovan, Jr., Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan, Susan Xenarios of the DownState Coalition for Crime Victims and Lynn Parrish of the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). The announcement was made at the future site of New York City's new state-of-the-art DNA laboratory in Manhattan which is scheduled to open in the fall.

"In New York City, we've driven crime down to its lowest levels and the establishment of a State DNA Databank will ensure that we keep making America's safest big city even safer by helping prevent crimes before they happen," said Mayor Bloomberg. "There is no doubt that a State DNA Databank is our best tool for catching violent offenders before they become serial offenders - and 43 states across the country have already recognized this and enacted similar laws. Today, New York State has one of the weakest DNA databank laws in the country and it's time for that to change. I urge expedited enactment of this critical legislation because when it comes to cutting-edge policing and enforcement technologies, New York should be leading the charge, not lagging behind."

The law establishing the New York State DNA Databank was passed in 1996 and the Databank itself became fully operational in April 2000. The Databank is divided into two areas, a Forensic Index and a Convicted Offender Index. The Forensic Index contains DNA profiles extracted from crime scene evidence while the Convicted Offender Index contains the profiles of offenders convicted of certain crimes designated by state law. The DNA profiles in the Databank are constantly compared to each other to identify patterns among different crimes and matches between convicted offenders and crimes. Under current law, less than half of all convicted felons and approximately 6% of all convicted misdemeanor offenders are required to provide DNA samples for inclusion in the Databank. Forty-three states currently require all convicted felons to provide DNA samples for inclusion in their respective DNA databanks. Twenty-seven states, including New York, require DNA samples from offenders convicted of certain misdemeanors. No state currently requires all convicted criminals to provide DNA samples.

The hits generated in the first six years of the New York State DNA Databank illustrate that violent felony offenders do not confine themselves to violent offenses. Since the advent of the Databank, 1,478 New York City crimes have been the subject of DNA Databank matches or "hits," 1,207 of them sexual assaults. Approximately 85% of the hits received on sexual assault cases have come from non-sex-related qualifying offenses. When the Databank was expanded in 2004, it immediately began matching offenders convicted of non-violent crimes like bail jumping and promoting prison contraband with violent crimes like rape and homicide. In other states, DNA databanks have solved numerous violent crimes with samples taken from offenders convicted of crimes like forgery, drug possession, and car theft, none of which require a DNA sample in New York.

New York City has invested more than $250 million in what will be the most advanced forensic DNA laboratory in the country. Scheduled for completion in November of 2006, this new state-of-the-art facility will greatly expand existing testing capacity, allowing for DNA analysis to be performed in all cases as business as usual, instead of just sex crimes and homicides. It will also be the first forensic laboratory in the country with the ability to perform a new type of "high sensitivity" analysis designed to extract DNA profiles from tiny samples left behind at crime scenes. The new laboratory is expected to significantly increase the number of forensic samples that New York City contributes to the state's DNA Databank. However, without passage of this DNA legislation the lab will be unable to maximize its capacity to analyze and evaluate this critical data.

"DNA data has been responsible for 210 sex offender arrests in New York City since 2002 alone," said Police Commissioner Kelly. "DNA evidence also played a crucial role in the arrest recently of a Queens man for a string of rapes dating back to 1995. By including DNA from everyone convicted of misdemeanors, the database would be vastly expanded and provide even greater protection against predators who would no longer be able to manipulate the standard statute of limitations."

"New York State needs to take full advantage of scientific advances in DNA technology," said Manhattan District Attorney Morgenthau. "The expansion of the State DNA Databank to include all criminal convictions is a long overdue legislative change."

"DNA technology is one of the most effective tools available to law enforcement today," said District Attorney Hynes. "It has the power to solve previously unsolvable crimes, as well as to exonerate the innocent and since the establishment of DNA databanks, my office has been able to prosecute over 100 rapes that had previously been unsolved."

"The cost of omitting over half of all crimes from those requiring submission of a DNA sample upon conviction - as is the case under existing law - is that those who commit brutal acts of violence may escape identification and remain free to leave more victims in their wake," said Queens District Attorney Brown. "That price is too high. New York needs to expand its DNA database to include all convicted criminals as soon as possible."

"This proposal can only help to further build the public's confidence in the process of seeking justice for all concerned," said Bronx District Attorney Johnson. "Law abiding citizens will have nothing to fear, and it also benefits those defendants who, in fact, are innocent of a crime with which they may have been charged."

"The community at large will be better protected as a result of our enhanced ability to arrest those who have engaged in criminal conduct and thereby limit their opportunity to commit still more crimes in the immediate future," said Johnson.

"DNA samples are to the 21st century what fingerprints were a century ago," said District Attorney Donovan. "The State Legislature needs to heed our call so that countless crimes, from rapes and murders, to burglaries can be solved and prosecuted. The end result will be more criminals taken off our streets."

"Contrary to popular belief, violent serial offenders - especially sex offenders - are not specialists," said Criminal Justice Coordinator Feinblatt. "They get convicted of every crime in the book, from the most serious felony to the most minor misdemeanor. And every time that happens, it is an opportunity for us to prevent a rape or save a life. Expanding New York's DNA Databank to include all crimes will give us exactly the tool that we need to stop violent offenders at the beginning of their criminal careers, not the end - after one rape, instead of five or ten or twenty. The sooner we get their DNA into the Databank, the sooner we can get them off of our streets."

"This law will help in the acquisition of sound evidence, and sound evidence enhances the likelihood of just verdicts," said Dr. Hirsch. "With the passage of this legislation, the City will be able to maximize its investment in this critical DNA technology to help keep all New Yorkers safe."

Under Mayor Bloomberg, the City has made several significant investments in DNA technology. These include cutting-edge initiatives like the John Doe Indictment Project, in which prosecutors present charges and obtain Grand Jury indictments against the DNA profiles of unknown perpetrators, or "John Does," thus stopping the clock on the statute of limitations and ensuring that these perpetrators will be held accountable no matter how long it takes to arrest them. Since the program began, prosecutors throughout the City have secured 82 John Doe indictments - almost four times the total of all prior years combined.

In addition, the Bloomberg Administration created the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART), a program that provides teams of highly-trained medical professionals that are on-call 24-hours a day to respond to victims of sexual assault at all City hospitals within one hour of their arrival. These teams provide counseling and other essential services to victims while also collecting crucial forensic evidence to enhance the prosecution of these terrible crimes. The SART program was launched in the Bronx in April 2004, expanded to Brooklyn in June 2005 and to both Queens and Manhattan in March 2006. In addition, the NYPD has launched the BioTracks Project, which employs specially trained teams to look for DNA evidence in burglaries, crimes in which DNA was not previously recovered.

[KNOWTHIS]

would make New York the first state in the country to require all convicted felons and misdemeanor offenders to provide DNA samples

In this day and age of “terror” the term criminal is already defined so loosely. By also including minor misdemeanor charges in to this DNA law virtually anyone could fall in to the category.

Check out the list of misdemeanor offenses:
www.pdsdc.org/CriminalLawDatabase/misdoffenses.asp

You could be required to submit DNA just because of "speeding", "trespassing" or even "failure to pay fare" violations.

And what the hell exactly is "confidence game"?

[KNOWTHIS]

Hey Swamp, click your link to that story and tell me what you get.

[Swamp Gas]

knowthis said:

Hey Swamp, click your link to that story and tell me what you get.

For yours, British Columbia misdemeanor charges

For Mine, now a deadlink...Weird. Good thing I copied it.

[KNOWTHIS]

Oops, about my link, thanks for that.

[KNOWTHIS]

The three that I named I'm pretty sure are misdemeanor charges in most states in the US as well.

[KNOWTHIS]

From Democracr Now:

Greg Palast on His New Book "Armed Madhouse"
AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Greg Palast joins us in the studio right now. He has a brand new book. It's called Armed Madhouse, and the subtitle is Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Class War. Welcome to Democracy Now!

GREG PALAST: Thanks, Amy, for getting the entire subtitle without choking. There's a lot of ground to cover in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: There certainly is. And right now, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who you recently met with and interviewed and we broadcast on Democracy Now!, was in Vienna, offering to the poor of Europe cheap oil. Of course, the deaths continue in Iraq, both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. We have the spy scandal that is unfolding here in the United States. Link them.

GREG PALAST: Yeah, that's why I wrote a book, because it does link the whole thing together. I mean, I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know, and you showed our interview a few weeks ago. He's offered the U.S. $50-a-barrel oil. That's a third off of what we're paying right now. Now, you would think our president would be down in Caracas kissing Hugo Chavez's behind and saying, "Thank you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let's make a deal," because Chavez wants a deal.

But he's not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing about a million jobs right now. And the reason he's not is that what Chavez will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It's not about petroleum, it's about petrodollars, as I explain in the book. In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he's not trying to get Abdullah's oil. Abdullah can't drink the stuff. He's got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the -- when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush's mad spending spree.

We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, you know, stone sober, apparently. And someone's got to pay for that. And basically we're paying for it by effectively an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they're recycling the money back and paying for George Bush's spending spree on ending inheritance taxes, you know, several wars, etc.

Now, Hugo Chavez says, "I'll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor, but to everyone. But I'm not giving you back the money. That money is going to stay in Latin America to build our nations." And he just withdrew $20 billion out of the U.S. Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a punch in the face of the U.S. administration, far more than withholding oil, withholding and withdrawing petrodollars, as I explain in the book, and that's why you have that little nice floater from -- balloon thrown out by Reverend Robertson, Pat Robertson, saying "Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him, and I think we ought to just go and do it," because they have got to get that -- it's not that they need that oil, they need that oil money. And if they can't get it, they have to eliminate Hugo Chavez.

AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?

GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it's about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn't go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn't get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, "There'll be no oil coming out of that nation." They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.

And so, what I found, what I discovered that they're very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq's oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It's quite wild. And it's all about a plan to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, "enhances its relationship with OPEC." In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.

And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you'll see in next week's Harper's coming out, which is basically an excerpt from the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper's, say, yeah, he's got more oil than Saudi Arabia.

AMY GOODMAN: And is it accessible?

GREG PALAST: That's the trick. It's accessible, but the price of oil -- it's heavy oil, which means it costs about -- you need oil to be about $30 a barrel, less than half of what it is now. Chavez says, "Cut a deal with me. Oil will never drop below a minimum price, but we'll get off this insane world-destroying $75 a barrel. I'll give you cheap oil, but you just put a floor under it." He shook hands with Bill Clinton on the deal. And Bush came in and spit on his hand, to say the least. He had the guy kidnapped back in 2002. Bush does not -- you have to remember, he doesn't like cheap oil. When we talk about paying $3-a-gallon gasoline, Bush's benefactors, donors and his own family collects the $3 a gallon.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

GREG PALAST: Well, we're paying three bucks a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting $3 a gallon. There's a chapter called "Trillion-Dollar Babies." When Bush came in, we had oil as low as $18 a barrel. It was like water. Bush has successfully built up the price of oil from 18 bucks a barrel to over $70 a barrel. That's the "mission accomplished." He didn't make a mistake here. That's the "mission accomplished."

ExxonMobil, which after Enron is the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns, its value of its reserves, of its oil reserves, because of the Bush wars and Bush actions, has gone up by almost exactly $1 trillion in value. Just one company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company. That's the Bush benefactors. And you have to look at where's Bush make his money.

So, the problem that they have now is that Chavez is trying to supplant the Saudis running OPEC, and we've got a president who basically is caught up in, you know, these guys in bathrobes and crowns, these dictators of Saudi Arabia in the Gulf. And that's what the Bush family is linked up to, and they are not going to let them be supplanted by Chavez.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, when you open your book, Armed Madhouse -- most people have a white space there, but you use every inch, and you have a secret history of the war over oil in Iraq.

GREG PALAST: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You have a chronology.

GREG PALAST: Yes. I had a big fight with my capitalist pig publisher to put in this very fancy colorful front page to give you a chronology, the complexity of these secret deals between the administration and big oil. We actually got our hands on two different plans for Iraq's oil, a 101-page plan and a 323-page plan, which is all about, in great detail, what we are going do with Iraq's oil, and the number of Iraqis involved in writing this thing is exactly zero. You know, and of course, the number of Americans who know that that's why we're in Iraq, and we even know from -- in my research for Armed Madhouse, going through this and getting this document, I now know what was in the discussions between the oil companies, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney, in his bunker.

AMY GOODMAN: All right, what?

GREG PALAST: Well, and you'll see there, they were going over the oil maps of Iraq, and the question was why was Ken Lay, you know, the kind of Al Capone of electricity --

AMY GOODMAN: He's on trial right now, of course, in Houston.

GREG PALAST: -- who's on trial right now. The verdict is about to come down. Why was he in the meeting with oil companies, looking over the maps of Iraq? The answer is he was on this committee, drafting up the program for what to do about Iraq. And they had to get rid of Saddam, because he was jerking the oil markets up and down. I was very interested in why did we go into Iraq suddenly, and the answer was he was destabilizing the oil markets. He was making it jump up, making it jump down. And he had to go. And that's right in the documentation.

AMY GOODMAN: Plan B?

GREG PALAST: Plan B -- there are two plans. There was a neo-con plan, which was 101 pages long. Now, they actually did want to break up OPEC and destroy Saudi Arabia, but the Bush family wasn't going to let that happen, nor was big oil. And you will see behind this all: James Baker and, of course, Dick Cheney. You know, actually the interesting thing -- I was just realizing this morning -- four years of investigation, Amy, you'll find in the book. You'll see all the stuff about the hugger muggers between Cheney, big oil, Rumsfeld, Jim Baker. Nowhere is there any discussion of George Bush. He was not in the picture. He was not in the frame. Basically, there was no decision made or even discussed with George Bush. He's the president who's not there.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Greg Palast. He has written a new book. It is called Armed Madhouse, short title, extremely long subtitle, Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. Why "Armed Madhouse"?

GREG PALAST: That's back to the Allen Ginsberg's Howl, my old teacher. He said, "The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse." It's like we have a circus of -- it's like we have the asylum taken over by the inmates, and they're quite dangerous. And so, we have to get out of it. So, in a way, the idea is to kind of arm you with the information.

AMY GOODMAN: The scheme to steal '08?

GREG PALAST: Yeah. Well, for those who, you know, know my background, I came to the U.S. attention when I broke a story that before the 2000 election, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris knocked off tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls of Florida, and this is what gave the election to George Bush in 2000. It was fixed by knocking off of these black voters. There's a chapter in the new book --

AMY GOODMAN: You broke this on BBC.

GREG PALAST: Yeah, I broke this on BBC, and to get in the United States, we got Michael Moore to put on a chicken suit and report it here as a joke. And then, thank you very much, Amy, for bringing it across the water and breaking through the electronic Berlin Wall. By the way, all of these stories are stories developed out of BBC and Guardian that basically are blacked out, except for here on Democracy Now! That's very important, because these are the stories that they don't want you to have for good reason. And they don't want you to have it, because -- I then followed up with 2004. Now, it's accepted 2000 pretty much was fixed. Well, there's a chapter, "Kerry won." 2004 was fixed. And the way it was done is that 3.6 million votes were cast and never counted in the United States. That's very important to know. This isn't Greg Palast conspiracy nut stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Say the number again.

GREG PALAST: 3.6 million ballots cast, never counted. And that's because they call these spoiled votes or rejected provisional ballots, 1.9 million so-called provisional ballots, and then, most of those don't get counted. And so, whose votes don't get counted? If it was random, it wouldn't matter. In other words, if these were votes where the machine doesn't record it properly, hanging chads, extra marks on a paper ballot, you had the wrong address on your absentee ballot, etc.

Three million ballots. Whose ballots? If you're a black person, the chance your ballot will be technically invalidated is 900% higher than if you're a white voter. Hispanic voter, 500% higher than if you're a white voter. Native Americans, it's like 2,000% higher than if you're a white voter. The overwhelming majority -- and I went to the state of New Mexico, which supposedly Bush won by 5,000 votes, 89% of the ballots were cast out of minority precincts that were thrown away. Kerry won New Mexico. You go into the dumpster, and it's black votes, 155,000 black votes that were chucked away in Ohio. Kerry won those votes. He won Ohio.

AMY GOODMAN: '08?

GREG PALAST: And '08, so what's happening is there is no fix of the system. In other words, just like black folk get bad schools and bad hospitals, they get the bad voting machines, which are going to kill those votes. But they're not satisfied with just letting the ballots be thrown away. They're going to move it along. And one of the things I discovered is the Republican Party has something called "caging lists," which came to our -- you know, just like you had Friday, the way the Yes Men capture material by using false websites, so through a false website we were able to capture Republican Party internal missives, through georgebush.org.

And so, what happened was is that they sent us a bunch of lists of literally tens of thousands of names of voters and addresses. We were wondering what the heck this was. It turns out these were almost all African American voters, who they were prepared to challenge in 2004, and they did, to say that these people shouldn't vote, because their addresses are suspect. And you'll see in the book that in the lists of thousands of black voters that they were challenging over their address were thousands of black soldiers who were sent to Iraq; go to Baghdad, and the Republican Party challenges your vote.

And that's the beginning, and because there's been really no action taken, they're accelerating the system now. And the next thing that they're going after is the Hispanic vote. So when we saw two million votes cast/not counted in 2000, nearly four million votes cast/not counted in 2004, you're going see that number massively increase in challenges to voters in 2008. And that's what's going back to this database story with the National Security Agency.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

GREG PALAST: So, you have to say, "Why are they collecting this data?" The answer is 2008. It's ultimately all about the elections.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is part one. Greg Palast, I want to thank you for being with us. You'll be traveling around the country, and you can go to our website at democracynow.org. We will link to Greg's website, gregpalast.com. Greg Palast's book is called Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

[KNOWTHIS]

BIG BROTHER INC. TRIES TO FOOL RANDI RHODES -- AND THAT'S NOT NICE


by Greg Palast

I smell mendacity! The sticky-sweet Atlanta drawl of the PR flack for America's private KGB was dancing in rhetorical circles with Randi Rhodes, Air American, on her broadcast yesterday. Unfortunately for the Bush-friendly Spies-R-Us contractor, Randi also has a keen nose for the telltale scent of pure bullshit.

By "private KGB," I mean ChoicePoint, Inc., the Atlanta company that keeps over 16 billion records on Americans which it sells to the FBI, Homeland Security and, through a bit of a slip-up, identity thieves.

They are watching you because George and Dick don't have time to track everyone in America (and that would be illegal, to boot), ChoicePoint does it. Then turns over the electronic you -- cross-matched profiles of voting registration, your DNA info and who knows what else -- for a price.

Randi was on the phone to one James Lee, Marketing Director of ChoicePoint. He was trying to explain some of the good work they do for government -- and responding to the evil lies about his corporation by a reporter (me).

I was listening in from a glass booth. The Eichmann treatment was required by ChoicePoint -- they wouldn't let her interview the company if anyone else was in the room. They also warned her, her interview would be "taped" ... AND, they didn't have to add, they know where she lives -- and where she votes and a whole lot more about Randi that maybe Randi herself doesn't know. Just a friendly warning.

It seems the data guys were upset that she had me on her show on Monday to talk about my investigations of the company which I conducted for BBC-TV, for Harper's and for my new book, Armed Madhouse. [ Yeah, that's a plug: order it at www.GregPalast.com ]

The company's name came up because of the Bush regime's getting caught with their hands in the data jar: spying on Americans, sucking our phone records into data bases where George and Dick can peruse them at leisure, without warrants.

ChoicePoint's the big banana in the data game, with fat no-bid contracts with Big Brother Bush's agency and the Department of Fatherland Security. (Homeland? Deutschland? Whatever.) Other governments, including Mexico, threatened ChoicePoint operatives with arrest for their use and misuse of data, but Dick and George like'm just fine. That's because ChoicePoint provides just the data that suits their needs -- not necessarily accurate, but accurate is not what is needed.

For example, ChoicePoint is the company that gave Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush the list of Florida voters, most of them Black, which were removed as "felons" before the 2000 election. The list was ridiculously inaccurate -- these were innocent citizens -- but those African-Americans lost their voting rights anyway and Jeb's brother thereby took the White House.

That's not nice, what Jeb and Katherine did -- but ChoicePoint kept silent. In return, they received a high, and highly suspect, fee for their "work."

And that's dangerous. Because, after ChoicePoint selected our president for us, our president selected them for no-bid jobs to save us from terrorists -- which they do by keeping track of us. (Odd, I thought Americans were the VICTIMS of terror -- they've made us the SUSPECTS.)

In Armed Madhouse, I reveal that one ChoicePoint executive confidentially told me the company's chairman hoped to build a national DNA database. Dracula's got nothing on these guys: they are already the biggest providers of DNA info to the FBI, they boast. They boast about it one week -- then they deny it another. This week's flavor is denial.

Back to Randi. I wasn't allowed in the room with her, so I waited in the glass booth. ChoicePoint had a huge list of complaints about my latest comment on their activities. I thought it important for the public to know how these private "data mining" companies drill into you and sell up the valuable nuggets they find to Mr. Bush's spy apparatus.

As a public service -- everyone needs a laugh once in a while -- I'm reprinting their inventive rebuttal to my report, "The Spies Who Shag Us" (for Buzzflash, May 12).

The company uses some clever rhetorical sleights of hand: "No data files or 'dossiers' exist at ChoicePoint." Now that's just darn strange for a data company.

But that's a quibble. Let's move to the out and out flaming fabrications, whoppers and what, before George Bush took office, we used to call "stinking, bald-faced lies." (Now we call it, "intelligence.")

ChoicePoint swore to Ms. Rhodes that they do not have or sell "credit" information. Yet, according to the company's own filing, among their other Big Brother products, they sell:

"...claims history data, motor vehicle records, police records, CREDIT INFORMATION and modeling services...employment background screenings and drug testing administration services, public record searches, vital record services, credential verification, due diligence information, DNA identification services, authentication services and people and shareholder locator information searches...print fulfillment, teleservices, database and campaign management services..."

Uh, oh. They are either fibbing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (their CEO is already under investigation by the SEC) -- or they are prevaricating to Randi. They shouldn't do that, because, the lady has class -- she let ChoicePoint give their goofy alibi uninterrupted; but, lie to her, and, as my editor says, "she'll bite off a chicken's head while it's laying eggs."

So who are you toying with, Mr. ChoicePoint, the SEC or Randi?

There's more. ChoicePoint's PR apologist says it doesn't maintain credit card records, but they fail to mention that they sell "credit report headers" -- which is why the federal government just fined them a record $10 million for letting identity thieves run off with this kind of info. They sell "SSN verification" (your social security number), financial reports, education verification, reference verification, felony checks, motor vehicle records, asset location and information on criminal suspects and their neighbors and relatives. Howdy, neighbor!

Let's go back to ChoicePoint's dirty work for the Brothers Bush. ChoicePoint writes that it didn't get its corporate hands dirty in the racist purge of voters which fixed the 2000 election. That was the fault of some company called "DBT" which ChoicePoint only purchased, they claim, "after DBT's work was done for the state."

Au contraire. ChoicePoint bought DBT before the election, while the purges were in full swing. Then, right after the "election," ChoicePoint's PR mouthpieces boasted about how the company was going to cash in on its "success" (their word) in purging Florida voter rolls. Their PR flack told me at the time, "Given the outcome of our work in Florida, and with a new president in place (!), we think our services will expand across the country." But then we caught them -- and they quit elections games and moved on to saving us from Al Qaeda. Lord help us.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about ChoicePoint. They're in it for the money. If they turned a blind eye to evil, if they abetted the theft of an election and kept silent to keep the money, well, that's the Fear Industry for you.

It's not what ChoicePoint sells that terrifies me, it's whom they're selling it to: a regime for whom information is a weapon and disinformation a way of life.


*****
View Palast's reports on ChoicePoint for BBC Television, and "Double Cheese with Fear," an excerpt from his new book, Armed Madhouse: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War" at www.GregPalast.com. Out June 6 -- but order it NOW and get punch a hole in the mainstream media's Electronic Berlin Wall. And hear Randi's interview with Palast and the ChoicePointer at www.GregPalsat.com

To link directly to this article: www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=503