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Kabul incident: more civilians killed by Americans

Let's face it.  If the stories circulating in Iraq are true -- if even half are true -- then there have been many occasions in which American troops have deliberately killed civilians.  Here's an excerpt from a report on NPR yesterday in which correspondent Peter Kenyon interviewed Iraqis about the Haditha massacre:

Kenyon: [A Sunni politician]  agrees that Haditha could become a rallying for Iraqis sick of the American presence.    

Sunni politician:  Definitely.  The call for an American withdrawal of the troops is going to be there and not only because Haditha accident.  Haditha accident is one of thousands of accidents that happened in Iraq.

Kenyon:  [He] was referring to numerous stories of atrocities, all horrific, all unverified, that constantly circulate among Iraqis.  Prime Minister Maliki's declaration today that there will be investigations of Haditha and other unspecified incidents raises both legal and political questions.

And then there's Afghanistan.  The first news came out day before yesterday on NPR and in the New York Times:

A deadly traffic accident caused by a United States military convoy quickly escalated into a full-blown anti-American riot that raged across much of the Afghan capital on Monday, leaving at least 14 people dead and scores injured.

Tomorrow's New York Times, has a fuller account of that incident, though of course it's probably not the last word, as we've come to realize:

Three people died in the crash caused by a runaway United States Army truck, and four people died of gunfire from the last vehicle in the convoy as the American forces extricated themselves from an increasingly hostile crowd, General Gozar said in an interview on Wednesday. He dismissed rumors that had spread through the city that the American soldiers deliberately rammed vehicles, even including his own car. "I can say clearly it was an accident," he said.

The United States military initially said in a statement that the truck had a mechanical failure and called the incident "a tragic accident." It said there were "indications" that "warning shots over the crowd" had been fired from at least one military vehicle. General Gozar's account is the first declaration from a senior Afghan official that American soldiers directed lethal fire on the crowd.

An American military spokesman, Col. Tom Collins, said he had not heard that the last vehicle had fired into the crowd or that four people had been killed by Americans. "Our soldiers believed fire was coming from the crowd, and they fired their weapons in self-defense," he said.

Just slip out the back, Jack...

The best per-screen box office take for a movie opening on Memorial Day weekend is no longer "The Shining."  It's.... take a  guess....

Gotta love it

Not the first time I've heard it, but it just seems more and more appropriate. 

Republican'ts.

One word.  Works perfectly.  I think I'd drop the apostrophe.

Some reasons for optimism about the new voting systems

Two very different experts in voting systems discuss Harri Hursti's report on the defects of Diebold voting machines.  One we've heard a lot about lately:  Bruce Funk, the county clerk in Utah who was fired for questioning the use of the machines in his county.  The other is David Dill, founder of Verified Voting and one of the first voices heard about the abuses of electronic voting machines.  He's at Stanford.

They talked with Amy Goodman this morning on Democracy Now!

Professor Dill on rogue software in the voting machine

People can install software on the Diebold machines if they have access to it and if they have the skills to modify the software. And those skills are widely available in our society. It’s difficult to protect machines, because they have to be delivered to polling places and are usually left there overnight before and after the election. Once bad software has been installed on a machine, it's very difficult to know that that's happened, and it’s very difficult to install known good software, because the bad software that’s already there can corrupt the new software that’s being installed....  Somebody could change votes in the software. They could change them during the election as the votes are being cast, after the election. They could change the way the user interface works, so it’s more confusing in subtle ways. They could cause the machine to crash at inconvenient times. Basically anything you could program a computer to do could be done. ...The most frightening thing about electronic voting, in general, is that you can't tell whether something like this has happened. People have said that there's no documented case of electronic voting machines being hacked. That's true, so far as I know. The frightening thing is that there’s no way to know if they have been hacked, so how do we know if the results of our elections are accurate?

Bruce Funk was forced out of his job because he investigated the machines

He [Diebold's top technician in Utah] said that on election day we're going to have some problems, we’re just going to have to work through them. Well, that was my first suspect that something could possibly go wrong, and I wanted to know what? But the initial thing that led me to getting a hold of Black Box Voting was that when I re-examined the machine, I found a number of them with insufficient backup memory, some as little as four megabytes, whereas a normal machine had anywhere from 27 to 29 megabytes. And so, this is what prompted me to get a hold of Black Box Voting, because the Diebold people weren't giving me any answers. The state officials responsible for elections had no experience with elections or the machines either. And so that's why I sought out advice there. And so I had watched the election happenings for nearly a year, and so at that time I was very familiar with a number of the organizations out there, and I felt that Black Box Voting was the very reputable one, and they would have the possibility of furnishing experts who could exam the machine and tell me exactly what was going on with, particularly at the time, the backup memory. And so, that's kind of how it started. As a result of that, Black Box Voting had to let some initial findings out, because there were some hazards there, plugs that were easily knocked out of their sockets and exposing wires, and as a result, Diebold, their legal counsel, representatives, the state, who has bought into this program for so tightly -- I can't figure out what the reasons are. Their election office represented from lieutenant governors and their legal counsel held a special meeting with the Emery County Commission, their legal counsel, and they met together, and as a result of that meeting, I was left on the outside...

David Dill is optimistic

I’m very optimistic, so long as we don’t insist that the problem be solved by next year. I can look at the progress that has been made over the last three years. Even since 2004, more -- you know, right now there are 27 or 28 states that require voter-verified paper records. At the end of 2004, it was maybe 13 states. I don't have the exact number. Now more than half of the voting population of the U.S. is in states that have voter-verified paper record requirements. So progress is being made, but it's slower than I would like.

US drops threat of force in Iraq

Although UPI and other agencies lead with the news about dropping the threat of force, as I would, the source of the report -- the New York Times --  buries it in the ninth paragraph

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will announce today that the Bush administration is willing to join multinational talks with Iran over its nuclear program if it suspends all nuclear activities, a senior State Department official said today.

The offer will be made as part of a package of incentives and threats of sanctions being developed by the United States and European diplomats at a conference in Vienna, the official said.

In Washington, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told reporters that President Bush had called the leaders of Russia, France and Germany on Tuesday to brief them on the decision, "and they all signed off."

"There are going to be some changes," Mr. Snow said of the United States position.

The United States has not had direct contacts with Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis, and Mr. Snow stressed today that the new round would not involve one-on-one discussions. "That's not part of the deal," he said.

Mr. Snow said the initiative did not amount to a new approach. He said it was "a way of making what we're doing more robust."

Pressure has been building on the administration to accept some sort of contact, as American and Europeans have struggled in recent weeks to find an approach that would win agreement from Russia and China, which are wary of imposing sanctions. European officials have said that Iran is more likely to be persuaded by any security guarantees included in the package if the United States is involved in the negotiations.

When Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent President Bush a rambling and highly critical letter earlier this month, administration officials dismissed it as not worthy of a response. But American diplomats suggested last week that they giving the question of talks of some sort of serious consideration.

In another move to enlist Russian support for a Security Council resolution, the Bush administration has agreed to language ruling out the immediate threat of military force, American and European officials said Tuesday...

Gore gets shrill

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists". In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming. Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right."