It’s worth catching Richard Clarke’s entertaining speech to the New
York Society for Ethical Culture, which he gave last night in an event co-sponosored by Pacifica
Radio. The former counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and Georgie Boy had some
funny lines. “If the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet,” Clarke said, referring to
Georgie’s new nominees, “is an infinite dot.”
When he got serious, Clarke recommended a slim book by various authors called “Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action.” You can
buy it online (proceeds go to
The Century Foundation, which just published it), or you can download it for free.
Also speaking last night was the freelance investigative reporter Greg
Palast, who works for the BBC and who used to write a column for The
Guardian in London (as one of George Orwell’s successors). “There are kooks and crazies
out there on the Internet who think Kerry won,” he said, italicizing his remarks as in
Oh my god! Palast is one of those maybe not-so-crazy kooks. And the reason, according
to this self-described “mainstream guy,” has to do with America’s “apartheid ballot-counting
system” in the last election.
Palast talks about the “spoiled” ballots in black communities in Ohio that were never counted
as just the tip of the iceberg, a mere surface indication of Republican attempts to disenfranchise
black voters through illegal manipulation and/or technical challenges. He said that after he and
others brought this to light he received a letter from The New York Times asking if he was 1) “a
conspiracy nut” and 2) “a sore loser.”
I’m not sure whether Palast was serious when he mentioned the letter. But he was serious
when he said the Times subsequently printed a story headlined “Internet Rumors … Debunked.” I
recall that front-page piece. The online headline is “Vote Fraud
Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.” Here’s the lede:
The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger
thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,”
trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org.
But the very untwitchy Palast emphasizes that the hacked votes in Ohio were not products of
the high-tech “black boxes” vulnerable to hacking that everybody was suspcious of. The hacked
votes were, in fact, the “spoiled” ballots produced by the lousy punchcard machines widely used
in black voting districts, a distribution he believes was purposeful.
And it is these votes, Palast has written, “the uncounted ballots in Ohio — more than a quarter
million designated ‘spoiled’ or ‘provisional’ — [that] undoubtedly contain[ed] enough votes to
overturn George Bush’s ‘victory’ margin of 136,000.”
