JM: What Ben said was that he was afraid of lawsuits. I didn't press him on the point, but it doesn't make any sense to me. The only things an individual can sue for is libel or defamation, and the First Amendment barriers are quite high. There was an OEN discussion of this just last week.
The Clint Curtis story and the Ohio 2004 story were in my third election series article last month. That article also included the story of Alvin Greene in South Carolina and the "Rob Georgia" files (2002) discovered by Bev Harris when the files were left unprotected on the Diebold server.
Briefly: Clint Curtis was a computer programmer hired by Florida Congressman Tom Feeney to re-program a voting machine so that its totals could be altered by someone who knew a special code. (While actually doing the work, he believed it was a security test.) In 2003, he told the whole story in congressional testimony. All the details were covered by Brad Friedman of BradBlog. The Ohio story is about how Bush stole his 2004 reelection, using a computer hack prepared in advance on orders of Ohio Sec'y of State Ken Blackwell.
Michael Connell, the computer programmer who did the dirty work on hire, was assassinated as a "national security threat" just before he was scheduled to testify in an election integrity lawsuit. Details were reported by Bob Fitrakis at the Free Press, and here's an hour-long video from the Corbett Report. If readers don't know these two stories, I recommend reading all the gory details--they will change, once and for all, the way you think about American democracy.
I'll say this about the Ohio story: It never made headlines because the details came out in dribs and drabs. Already in November '04, we knew about the voting machines that were kept in the warehouse, the long lines at Democratic polling places only, about the many dirty tricks played by the GOP in Ohio. We also knew that the central computer in Columbus that reported the vote totals from across the state had a mysterious "glitch" in the middle of the night and went black for 100 minutes.
But it wasn't until two years later, in 2006, that the fact came out that the "glitch" wasn't fixed, but rather the computer that came back on line in place of the Columbus SoS computer was actually operated out of Chattanooga, TN, by the White House IT guru, Mike Connell. And it was another two years before Connell was assassinated by his own employer, (as Fitrakis and Corbitt convincingly demonstrate).
All of it this is well-documented and mostly reported in mainstream media, but the story came out at a lawyerly pace. This is no accident--Fitrakis and co-counsel Cliff Arnebeck brought a lawsuit in Ohio where a lot of these facts came out in a process for which the legal euphemism is "discovery" -- It would more accurately be called "obfuscation."
This story should have been featured in banner headlines everywhere, the Watergate of our time. It is a disgrace that the "liberal American press" kept this story buried on the back pages and never put the pieces to together for its readership, let alone assigning investigative reporters to get to the bottom of the matter.
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