In case you have not been thoroughly convinced by listening to the confirmation hearings today that Bush’s cronyspook SecDef nominee Robert Gates is effin’ bad news for the country, get a load of what elections hero Bev Harris has to say about him. Gates served as the director of a creepy-ass electronic voting machine company, VoteHere. (VoteHere’s "Here" turns out to be a black box that you have to trust didn’t just register your vote for Beelzebub).
Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.
Flip please...
That’s right, this cloak-and-dagger mandarin at the Bush Court, an ex-director of the CIA, had an unseen hand in crafting the legislation that brought you the 2004 Presidential elections and the strange vote results in Ohio.
Never mind that Steny Hoyer – our guy, right? – shoved black box voting down our collective throat with lobbyists' funnymoney. At least Hoyer didn’t want to count our votes too. Well, Bush’s new Fiascomaster did. To top off all the HAVA lobbying and block box vote counting, Gates’ VoteHere actually tried to frame hero of democracy, Bev Harris!
VoteHere, a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens), for some reason claims they were unable to prevent themselves from being hacked. In this alleged hack, VoteHere claims that someone stole their source code. Said source code was offered to me, an obvious attempt at entrapment which I refused to touch with a 10-foot pole.
Nevertheless, VoteHere claimed to the newspapers that they had supposedly "tracked" the hacker and had identified the hacker as an activist in the election reform community.
For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated for this "hack" of VoteHere -- nevermind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop.
Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about VoteHere, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.
This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. (As if they couldn't get that in less dramatic ways in post-Patriot Act America).
I don’t know about you, but VoteHere’s Robert Gates kind of makes me sick. Harris concludes...
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote.
I’d say the same thing about fooling around with our nation’s misbegotten war.
We need a SecDef who is not some dust-me-off retread psychophant, rather an independent-thinking warrior genius. I nominate Wes Clark!
Bush, by his lying, his wanton disregard for American and Iraqi lives, his abject incompetence and, especially by his ascent to power by fraud, does not deserve to pick his own SecDef! Let the troops themselves vote! Let Congress vote! Let the people of the United States vote!
Just don’t let VoteHere count the results or we’ll wind up with Gates anyway!
[UPDATE: Check out ...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
...for more on our spooky SecDef In Waiting.]