Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
If you’ve never heard of King Lincoln v. Blackwell, don’t be too surprised. Project Censored calls the outsourcing of the 2004 Presidential elections in Ohio “one of the most censored stories in the world.” Originally filed on August 31, 2006 in Ohio, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell is an ongoing civil case to decide if the the Ohio Secretary of State at the time, Kenneth Blackwell, violated the Civil Rights Act (42 USC §§ 1983 and 1984) and the 1st, 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution by conspiring to “deprive and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote and have, in fact, deprived and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote by, in a selective and discriminatory manner, unfairly allocate election resources (such as voting machines), institute a system of provisional ballots, purge voter registrations, and broke the bi-partisan chain of custody ballots”. The vote at the heart of the issue is the 2004 Presidential election where, in defiance of exit poll data, there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.
New filings include a revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell died shortly after giving his deposition in a small plane crash that is described as “suspicious”*. In life, Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and their personal minister of propaganda, Karl Rove. Connell ran a private IT firm called GovTech that created the controversial electronic voting system that Ohio used during the election. GovTech’s system transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by a company called SmarTech. That is when the alleged vote shift happened that led to Bush’s unexpected victory.
The filing also contains a copy of the contract signed between Kenneth Blackwell and GovTech Solutions as well as a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system. In a possible indication that the system was designed with fraud in mind, the contracts and maps had never been made public until this filing. The lead attorney on the case, Cliff Arnebeck, consulted with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the network setup. Specifically, Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the ability to alter the results of the election. “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not,” Spoonamore responded, further explaining that SmarTech would have had “full access and could change things when and if they want.”
Spoonamore went on to conclude that “SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle.” For those of you not computer savvy, a mirror site is like a back back-up. It works when the main computer system fails. In contrast, a “man in the middle” is a deliberate computer hacking setup (and a violation of U.S. wiretapping statutes) in which a third party sits in between computer transmissions where they can illegally alter or steal the data. In an even more revealing statement by Spoonamore during the course of the e-mails with Arnebeck, he claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston. Blackwell’s response? “Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you,” Spoonamore wrote to Arnebeck. In a previously submitted affidavit, Spoonamore testified, “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control,” and that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen.
Contrary to any contention that SmarTech’s servers operated simply as mirrors and that a system failure was behind the transfer of data to the Republican partisan firm, the late Michael Connell swore under oath that, “To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation.” This is also confirmed by Bob Magnan, the state IT specialist for then Secretary of State Blackwell during the 2004 election. Magnan further claims that the control of the system was in the hands of private contractors at the time. Magnan was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night.
For those of you already suspect of electronic voting and the election of 2004, these new revelations are a smoking gun and a road map to how the election in Ohio was rigged in favor of George W. Bush. King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell may be a civil case, but this newly introduced evidence merits a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.
What do you think?
Source: TruthOut.org
* Commenter Otteray Scribe did the heavy lifting on locating more information about the crash, which as it turns out, is not very suspicious at all. His detailed and thorough post of the NTSB report is here. Thanks for the assist, Otteray Scribe!
~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
To quote Richard Feynman:
“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything…”
Here are both of the NTSB links on the Michael Connell crash. (The information from the second link was supplied by Otteray Scribe earlier in this thread.):
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20081223X12815&key=1
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20081223X12815&ntsbno=CEN09FA099&akey=1
From the first NTSB link (and referring to Michael Connell, the pilot):
The pilot reported a total flight time of 510 hours on his October 2007 FAA medical application, of which 50 hours were accumulated in the past 6 months. The pilot’s total and recent instrument flight experience could not be determined. The pilot had a history of seasonal allergies, treated with prescription medication that was reported to the FAA. While an over-the-counter sedating antihistamine was found in the pilot’s blood during postaccident toxicology testing, the investigation was unable to determine if the pilot was adversely affected by impairment.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:
The pilot’s inappropriate control inputs as a result of spatial disorientation, which led to an aerodynamic stall and loss of control. Contributing to the accident were the pilot’s decision to conduct flight into known icing conditions, ice accumulation that reduced the airplane’s aerodynamic performance, and the pilot’s failure to initially intercept and establish the airplane on the proper approach course. (end of excerpt)
anon nurse, William Colby’s death was a mystery to me. I thought upon hearing of it that I couldn’t think of anything that was going on at the time that he could illuminate that would be threatening. Our involvement in encouraging the overthrow of the Soviet Union was ongoing, no secrets there. Likewise, what he knew about Vietnam and the torture/murder program we had going on there via the CIA (on his watch) was old news. I didn’t really know that he had written a book; maybe he was planing another?
It’s a fascinating article by Mr. Grant. That tow rope (and sand) is certainly suspicious, no?
“Conspiracy theories, they are not just for nuts any more.” -Dredd
Well said, Dredd.
lottakatz,
Your comments made me think of William Colby’s death…
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm
WHO MURDERED THE CIA CHIEF?
William E. Colby: A Highly Suspicious Death
By Zalin Grant
This was Saturday, April 27, 1996. William Colby, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was alone at his weekend house across from Cobb Island, Maryland, 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. Colby, who was 76 years old, had worked all day on his sailboat at a nearby marina, putting it in shape for the coming summer.
After he got home from the marina, Colby called his wife, Sally Shelton, a high-ranking State Department official who was in Houston, Texas, visiting her mother. He told her that he had worked hard all day and was tired. He said he was going to steam some clams, take a shower, and go to bed.
Colby made the call at 7 p.m. He was seen a few minutes later by two sets of witnesses in his yard watering a willow tree. One of the witnesses was his gardener who dropped by to introduce his visiting sister. His two next-door neighbors saw him at the same time from their window. After he finished watering his trees, he went inside and had dinner.
The witnesses saw him at 7:15 p.m. The sun set at 7:57—42 minutes later.
When he was found dead in the water nine days later, it was said that he had gone out paddling his canoe at nightfall and drowned. I was in Paris when I read the story in the International Herald Tribune. I knew William Colby. And I didn’t believe that for one second. (end excerpt)
The problem with calling the death of someone like Mr. Collins an accident is that it fails to factor in a couple of principles that we are not used to discussing (or acknowledging) in a way that gives them the weight they should have. Those principles are that we have a government(s) that kills people surreptitiously and that the political value of murdering someone goes up commensurate with that persons ability to threaten the government or IMO, private interests.
Mr. Collins was in a position to reveal who the players were in a machine designed to rig an election, how the machine worked, how to determine if it was used and he probably had first hand knowledge of it being used. Mr. Collins could have brought down the Presidency and the political allies that planned and implemented it being a rigged election.
IMO the possibility of it actually being an accident would have been akin to the Bush Administration winning the lottery, the triple crown and the Irish sweepstakes on the same day. Mr. Collins was a high value target.
Likewise the death by suicide of Dr. David Kelly, the leaker that told the BBC that the Blair government “sexed up” WMD reports regarding Iraq. In that regard one needs look no further than our own Vice President and his cronies to see what a valuable lie WMD’s in Iraq was and the lengths a government would go to to protect them. Joe Wilson is lucky to be alive IMO. The British are more quick to demand resignations of Prime Ministers than we are to make the same demands of our Presidents. Kelly was a higher value target than Wilson was on those grounds. I have read more that one place that a friend of Dr. Kelly stated that Kelly said that if he turned up dead it would be a murder, not suicide or an accident.
The entire inquiry into the anthrax attacks essentially died with Dr. Bruce Ivins ‘suicide’. That he was named as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks was controversial from the very beginning and the more reporting done about the FBI’s proof that was disclosed the shakier the case against him became. Between 911 and the anthrax attacks the Constitution has been destroyed and the power of the government has become virtually absolute under the banner of national security. Ivins was a case that needed to be closed as quickly as possible with no real examination of the government’s case (in court) taking place.
The consolidation of a revolution wherein power migrated from the citizen to the government and business took place on the foundation of responding to 911 and the anthrax attacks. That is high value gain and if Ivins death put an end to questions about the anthrax attacks then the cost was miniscule in comparison.
I also put the DC Madame in the high value category. She was another person that told a friend that suicide was not her style but ended up dead of suicide. She probably couldn’t have brought down the government but she probably could have ended the career of a lot of politicians and prominent insiders and businessmen. There could have been a dramatic reordering of the status quo if she talked. Again, high gain for little risk.
Governments and powerful people have been killing whistleblowers for centuries, why would one think it suddenly stopped being a tool in the later half of the 20th century?
FRIDAY, AUG 1, 2008
Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News
BY GLENN GREENWALD
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html
A good examination of the evidence against Ivins in the Free Republic. I saw these arguments in various places but this article does a good job of pulling them all together, whatever one may think about Free Republic. Remove spaces:
www. freerepublic . com/focus/f-news/2071633/posts
Dr David Kelly
“The official story of Dr David Kelly is that he took his own life in an Oxfordshire wood by overdosing on painkillers and cutting his left wrist with a pruning knife.
He was said to be devastated after being unmasked as the source of the BBC’s claim that the Government had ‘sexed up’ the case for war in Iraq.
A subsequent official inquiry led by Lord Hutton into the circumstances leading to the death came to the unequivocal conclusion that Kelly committed suicide.”
http://levantnotes.blogspot.com/2010/07/david-christopher-kelly-cmg-14-may.html
Thanks for the visit and link Brad! FWIW, you should also receive an award for the sustained, in-depth coverage of the Chamber of Commerce plan to target, for disinformation and dirty tricks, influential bloggers, other journalists and public figures. That you were on their list (as was Velvet Revolution, a voting rights coalition you helped found) is a badge of honor worthy of being considered an award in and of itself.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8351
The discussion of the plane crash is useful to a degree, but this case (potential large-scale vote rigging/alterations) really hinges on IT Security issues, and that aspect isn’t being discussed here,
For anyone who’s interested, the phrase “man in the middle” is an important phrase in IT security. If you’re interested a search for “man in the middle attack” will turn up good explanations like the one on Wikipedia.
I’m no IT security expert, but passing the data through a third party (Smar-Tech) seems pretty strange at best. Even if no data was altered, if Smar-Tech isn’t certified in some way, it would be a serious problem to transfer data to them.
“It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.” – Stalin
Brad Friedman,
You’re welcome and thank you for the links. I always find deviations from investigative procedures . . . interesting. Great job over there at BradBlog. Keep up the good work. As this story evolves, I’ll keep an eye open for opportunities to cooperate on it.
OS,
exactly.
Bud, when flying over a trackless swamp filled with alligators, especially at night, the engine goes to automatic rough.
Bruce, the chances of suicide are very low. I do a kind of profiling called “psychological autopsy” and none of the key indicators are present. I would have to be shown a lot more evidence than has emerged so far to be convinced. Also, keep in mind that the NTSB crash investigators are pros and would have taken those indicators into consideration.
Collins flew into known icing, with pilots making that approach ahead of him reporting icing. He was way off the glide slope, which is not a good sign. That indicates some lack of skill, since he was making a precision instrument approach and should not have been drifting off the glide slope that far. He did not get the full briefing when he called for a wx briefing. If a pilot is going to fly into bad weather, you want the full meal deal. The radio transmissions are consistent with a guy who is pressing on despite the whole situation deteriorating and finally when the ice load got too bad, the plane ‘departed;’ that is, stalled and went in. The last words recorded by ATC in such cases are typically consistent with the last words from Collins–something you cannot print in a family newspaper.
I think the conspiracy theorists are straining at gnats. In the case of a crash like this, the first thing law enforcement and investigators do is secure the scene and remove the wreckage to a hangar as soon as possible. As soon as the body or bodies are removed, get the thing on a flatbed truck and into a secure hangar before looters have a chance of stealing something potentially important. As I said earlier, this whole situation reads like a clinic on what not to do.
Otteray Scribe 1, July 26, 2011 at 9:24 pm
I once flew along for fifteen minutes keeping an eye on the landing light of an aircraft that appeared to be on a collision course with me.
OS,
Like they say, as long as it doesn’t get any bigger, it won’t hit ya.
That goes for daylight too.
Isn’t it phenomenal how your eyes (and my ears — engine sounds) can
play havoc with you at night?
Based on what Otteray Scribe has presented, I’d say Connell’s death must still be regarded as suspicious – though suicide is more plausible than homicide, and accident due to icing does seem the most likely explanation. If I were investigating this case, I’d want to know if Connell was the kind of man who’d risk flying in bad weather. If not, then why did he? Suicide under circumstances that indicate accidental death is a way to make sure insurance benefits get paid to survivors. It also protects those survivors from the emotional damage associated with suicide, and leaves the deceased’s good name unstained.
If suicide, then why? Absent depression one must look for evidence that the deceased was being pressured and concluded he had no better way out. Here one enters the realm of shadowy conspiracy theories, and one must demand convincing proof before entering that thicket. But Connell was apparently a man who knew too much, and perhaps was threatened: silence yourself, or – your family is left penniless; or they die too. In any case the untimely death of a witness must always raise the question, cui bono? (who benefits?) and suspicion must be cast in that direction until evidence rules it out.
We have important guests with us tonight. Thanks for stopping by Mr. Friedman.
OS,
I think you need to lay off the Mad Dog when you are flying at night! 🙂
Gene H – Before you conclude that the crash was “not very suspicious at all”, (which it may or may not be), as based solely on the NTSB report, I would point you to British journalist Simon Worrall’s investigative report in Maxim: http://www.maxim.com/humor/stupid-fun/86265/mysterious-death-bushs-cyber-guru.html, the newest points about which I highlight (and link to) in my advance preview of the article with background context, right here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7652
FWIW, I was awarded a Project Censored award for my coverage of the Connell case, which I had been on long before (and long after) his sudden and disturbing death. So if I can help with anything here, please feel free to give me a shout. And thanks otherwise for picking up the story and sharing it with Turley readers!
Then I guess I did then.
You also said that in a forum frequented by members of the legal community and having an international audience I might add.
kderosa,
You said referring to King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell: “Sounds like plaintiff’s lawyer lacks such good judgment and credibility.” at 3:20 PM. http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/26/dead-men-do-tell-tales-of-rigged-elections/#comment-252520
Being that plaintiff’s counsel is named Cliff Arnebeck, that exactly what you said and any reasonable person would interpret your statement as saying such.