James van Luik

[By clicking on this signature one has access to all articles of the JvL Bi-Weekly.]

Also:All nuclear reactors emit radiation on a routine basis, endangering the health of people and the environment. Dr. Chris Busby

The hysterical aftermath of September 11 has put into place the main components of a police state.

Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.

President Bush claims the power to set aside Habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the US, the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give rein to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness.

The judiciary has to some extent defended Habeas corpus against Bush's attack, but the protection that the principle offers against arbitrary seizure and detention has been breeched. Whether courts can fully restore Habeas corpus or whether it continues in weakened form or passes by the wayside remains to be determined.

Americans may be unaware of what it means to be stripped of the protection of Habeas corpus, or they may think police authorities would never make a mistake or ever use their unbridled power against the innocent. Americans might think that the police state will only use its powers against terrorists or "enemy combatants".

But "terrorist" is an elastic and legally undefined category. When the President of the United States declares: "You are with us or against us," the police may perceive a terrorist in a dissenter from the government's policies. Political opponents may be regarded as "against us" and thereby fall in the suspect category. Or a police officer may simply have his eye on another man's attractive wife or wish to settle some old score. An enemy combatant might simply be an American who happens to be in a foreign country when the US invades. In times before our own when people were properly educated, they understood the injustices that caused the English Parliament to pass the Habeas corpus Act of 1679 prohibiting the arbitrary powers that are now being claimed for the executive branch in the US.

The PATRIOT Act has given the police autonomous surveillance powers. These powers were not achieved without opposition. Civil libertarians opposed it. Bob Barr, the former US Representative who led the impeachment of President Clinton, fought to limit some of the worst features of the act. But the act still bristles with unconstitutional violations of the rights of citizens, and the newly created powers of government to spy on citizens has brought an end to privacy.

The prohibition against self-incrimination protects the accused from being tortured into confession. The innocent are no more immune to pain than the guilty. As Stalin's show trials demonstrated, even the most committed leaders of the Bolshevik revolution could be tortured into confessing to be counter-revolutionaries.

The prohibition against torture has been breeched by the practice of plea bargaining, which replaces jury trials with negotiated self-incrimination, and by sentencing guidelines, which transfer sentencing discretion from judge to prosecutor. Plea bargaining is a form of psychological torture in which innocent and guilty alike give up their right to jury trial in order to reduce the number and severity of the charges that the prosecutor brings.

The prohibition against physical torture, however, held until the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As video, photographic, and testimonial evidence make clear, the US military has been torturing large numbers of people in its Iraq prisons and in its prison compound at Guantanamo, Cuba. Most of the detainees were people picked up in the equivalent of KGB Stalin-era street sweeps. Having no idea who the detainees are and pressured to produce results, torture was applied to coerce confessions.

Everyone is disturbed about this barbaric and illegal practice except the Bush administration. In an amendment to a $440 billion defense budget bill last Wednesday, the US Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in US government custody. President Bush responded to the Senate's will by repeating his earlier threat to veto the bill. Allow me to torture, demands Bush of the Senate, or you will be guilty of delaying the military's budget during wartime. Bush is threatening the Senate with blame for the deaths of US soldiers who will die because they don't get their body armor or humvee armor in time.

It will be a short step from torturing detainees abroad to torturing the accused in US jails and prisons.

The attorney-client privilege, another great achievement, has been breeched by the Lynne Stewart case. As the attorney for a terrorist, Stewart represented her client in ways disapproved by prosecutors. Stewart was indicted, tried, and convicted of providing material support to terrorists.

Stewart's indictment sends a message to attorneys not to represent too dutifully or aggressively clients who are unpopular or demonized. Initially, this category may be limited to terrorists. However, once the attorney-client privilege is breeched, any attorney who gets too much in the way of a prosecutor's case may experience retribution. The intimidation factor can result in an attorney presenting a weak defense. It can even result in attorneys doing as the Benthamite US Department of Justice (sic) desires and helping to convict their client.

In the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a shield of the accused. This is necessary in order to protect the innocent. The accused is innocent until he is proven guilty in an open court. There are no secret tribunals, no torture, and no show trials.

Outside the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a weapon of the state. It may be used with careful restraint, as in Europe today, or it may be used to destroy opponents or rivals as in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

When the protective features of the law are removed, law becomes a weapon. Habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege, no crime without intent, and prohibitions against torture and ex post facto laws are the protective features that shield the accused. These protective features are being removed by zealotry in the "war against terrorism."

The damage terrorists can inflict pales in comparison to the loss of the civil liberties that protect us from the arbitrary power of law used as a weapon. The loss of law as Blackstone's shield of the innocent would be catastrophic. It would mean the end of America as a land of liberty.

(Editor's note: This article is taken from the book "The Present Danger" by Ernest Sternglass.)

Strangely enough, it was through my concern about the possible effect of the October 1976 Chinese fallout discovered in southeastern Pennsylvania by the operators of a nuclear plant on the Susquehanna River not far from Three Mile Island that I first learned of the high releases from the Millstone reactor.

Apparently, as in the case of the Albany-Troy episode back in 1953, a heavy rainstorm brought down very large amounts of fallout from a nuclear cloud, setting off radiation alarms at the Peach Bottom Nuclear Power station near the Maryland border. That rainout had caused the evacuation of many of the workers from the plant. The EPA had failed to warn either the public, state health authorities, or the reactor's health physicists of the potentially high local fallout, hoping that it might not happen. Only when the plant supervisor got in touch with Thomas Gerusky at the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Radiation Control and checks were made at other locations such as the Three Mile Island plant did it become clear that the high iodine 131 levels were due to fallout, and not an accident at Peach Bottom.

When the iodine levels in the milk started to climb to a few hundred Pico curies and no one had warned the public that pregnant women should not drink the milk, a colleague of mine at the University of Pittsburgh and I decided to hold a news conference to issue such a warning.

As it turned out, Gerusky decided not to order the cows to be placed on stored hay, even though some areas in Pennsylvania reached levels close to 500 Pico curies per liter. Only in Massachusetts and briefly in Connecticut and New York did the health departments order dairy cattle to be switched to uncontaminated feed, and only in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which obtained most of its milk from Massachusetts, did infant mortality continue its sharp decline in the following few months among all the New England states.

When a news story with my findings on the rises in infant mortality following this episode was published by the Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service in the summer of 1977, I received a phone call from a newspaper reporter in Connecticut, who asked me whether I had examined the possible effect of the Millstone plant releases on the pattern of infant mortality changes in New England. Someone had given him a copy of a recent annual environmental report for this plant, and he wondered whether I might be willing to look at it for him since he was unable to interpret its significance.

When the report arrived a few days later, I turned to the pages dealing with milk measurements. I could hardly believe my eyes. The control farms located in a direction where the wind rarely carried the gases from the stack showed levels of strontium 90 of only 5 to 7 Pico curies per liter, similar to the rest of the East Coast. The concentrations in other nearby farms, however, reached values as high as 27 of these units, higher than those typical for Connecticut during the height of nuclear-bomb testing back in the early 1960s and similar to the highest concentrations measured by N.U.S. at Shippingport. For the people living within 10 to 20 miles of the plant, nuclear-bomb testing might just as well have never ended.

And when I looked at infant mortality in New England in preparation for a lecture at the University of Rhode Island, the familiar pattern I had seen at Dresden, Indian Point, and Shippingport once again confirmed the seriousness of these levels of fallout in the milk.

While throughout the 1950s and 1960s all the New England states had shown the same infant mortality rate, following the onset of releases from Millstone in 1970, Rhode Island, directly downwind, suddenly stopped declining as rapidly as all the other states. By early 1976, before the October fallout arrived from China, Rhode Island had nearly twice the infant mortality rate of New Hampshire.

Shortly after I presented these findings at the University of Rhode Island, I received a telephone call from State Representative John Anderson of the Connecticut legislature, asking me whether I would be willing to undertake a more detailed study of the possible health effects of Millstone and the nearby Connecticut Yankee Reactor at Haddam Neck for the people of Connecticut. I agreed on the condition that he would send me the full environmental reports for the two plants for every year of their operation, together with the detailed annual vital statistics reports of the State of Connecticut.

A few weeks later a large box arrived containing the reports. The story they revealed was a repetition of what had taken place at Shippingport, except that this time the environmental and health data were much more detailed and extended over many years before and after the start of operation.

Again, the strontium 90 levels in the soil and milk increased as one approached each of

the two plants. The levels were a few times higher near the Millstone Plant, with its boiling-water reactor (BWR), than near the Haddam Neck plant, with its pressurized-water reactor (PWR), which was similar to Shippingport and Three Mile Island.

This time, however, data was available for every year of operation on a month-by-month basis, and it was possible to see how in the first few years of operation, the strontium 90 levels were no different near the plants than from those in the rest of New England. But gradually, as the fallout from bomb testing was washed into the rivers and the ocean by the rains, the soil and milk levels of strontium 90 declined all over New England, while they stayed high or even rose for the farms within a 10- to 15-mile radius of the plants.

On a number of occasions, when there was a particularly heavy fallout from a Chinese nuclear test, as in October of 1976, the records of the milk measurements showed the arrival of the fallout very clearly as a peak, particularly for the short-lived iodine 131 and strontium 89, and to a lesser degree for the long-lived cesium 137 and strontium 90. But what was even more disturbing were the even larger peaks of strontium 90 and cesium 137 in July and August of 1976, months before the bomb was detonated, not only in the local farms but as far downwind as Providence, Rhode Island.

Yet the summary in the front of the utility's environmental report for 1976 maintained, as it had every year, that the strontium 90 and cesium 137 in the milk was attributable to fallout from nuclear testing. It was sad to see that the once so hopeful nuclear industry now needed the continuation of nuclear-bomb tests to stay in operation.

To calculate the radiation doses to the bones of children, I used the high local excess values of strontium 90 in the milk along with the NRC's own calculations for their model given in NUREG 1.109. The results were of the order of a few hundred millirems per year, many hundreds of times the value of less than 1 millirad arrived at by the utility when the strontium 90 was left out of the calculations, and far above the maximum of 25 millirems per year that was proposed by the EPA as the maximum permissible value from the nuclear fuel cycle.

Thus it was no surprise that the EPA as well as the NRC issued statements after my reports had been sent to State Representative Anderson and Congressman Christopher Dodd, in whose district the Millstone Plant was located, which claimed that the high strontium 90 and cesium 137 levels in the milk near this plant were due to fallout and could not be attributed to releases from the plant. The EPA and NRC never even attempted to explain why the levels of these radioactive substances should increase as one approached the reactor from every direction.

Instead, these government agencies, on whom the public depended for the protection of its health and safety, tried to mislead the public. They claimed that there was little strontium 89 present along with the strontium 90, as is always the case when fresh fission products escape into the environment, and that therefore the strontium 90 could not be due to plant releases.

But what the non-specialist could not have known is that strontium 89 has a very short half-life of only 50 days compared with 30 years for strontium 90. While the long-lived strontium 90 continues to build up in the soil around the plant, the strontium 89 rapidly decays away. Thus, when the cows return to pasture in the spring and summer, the milk shows predominantly the accumulated strontium 90, and very little of the short-lived strontium 89.

3. IRAQ HAS DESCENDED INTO ARARCHY SAYS FISK

Nigel Morris

Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad just half a mile from the so-called Green Zone, an Independent debate was told last night.

Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, whose new book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East has just been published by 4th Estate, painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq more than two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

He said that the "constant, intensive involvement" in the Middle East by the West was a recurring pattern over centuries and was the reason why "so many Muslims in the Middle East hate us". He added: " We can close doors on history. They can't."

Fisk doubted the sincerity of Western leaders' commitment to bringing democracy to Iraq and said a lasting settlement in the country was impossible while foreign troops remained. "In the Middle East, they would like some of our democracy, they would like a couple of boxes off the supermarket shelves of human rights as well. But I think they would also like freedom from us."

Recalling the sight of an immense US convoy rolling into the country's capital, he said: "A superpower has a visceral need to project military power. We can go to Baghdad, so we will go to Baghdad."

He told the debate in London: "The Americans must leave Iraq and they will leave Iraq, but they can't leave Iraq and that is the equation that turns sand to blood. At some point, they will have to talk to the insurgents.

"But I don't know how, because those people who might be negotiators the United Nations, the Red Cross their headquarters have been blown up. The reality now in Iraq is the project is finished. Most of Iraq, except Kurdistan, is in a state of anarchy."

He said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday's national vote on the country's proposed constitution was "unreal" to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. "They aren't sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution."

With insurgents half a mile from Baghdad's Green Zone, Fisk said the danger to reporters from a brutal insurgency that did not respect journalists was increasing. "Every time I go to Baghdad it's worse, every time I ask myself how we can keep going. Because the real question is the story worth the risk?"

He attacked television reporters for flinching from depicting the everyday bloodshed on the streets of Iraq. "You can go and see Saving Private Ryan or Kingdom of Heaven people have their heads cut off. When it comes to real heads being cut off, you can't. I think television connives with governments at war." He added: "Newspapers can tell you as closely as they can what these horrors are like."

Asked if the "anger and passion" he felt over the events he witnessed had affected his objectivity, he said: "When you are at the scene of a massacre, you are entitled to feel immense anger and I do."

He rejected suggestions that graphic pictures of the dead in newspapers took away their dignity. He said: "My view is the people who are dead would want us to record what happened to them."

4. DON'T BE DUPED BY BOTTLED WATER

PATRICIA LYNN

In recent trips to my local grocery store, I have become increasingly aware of the volume of bottled water that people in my neighborhood buy. Almost an entire aisle is dedicated to it, and people are buying by the case. The phenomenon is a little odd. Boston’s tap water seems fine to me.

Recently, the head of the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority took the Pepsi challenge. He and a panel of tasters, including a local wine expert and a local beer brewer, did a taste test with Boston water, Pepsi’s Aquafina, and a few other bottled water brands. Not only did the entire panel agree that the five water samples tasted roughly the same, lab tests showed that there were no significant differences between the quality of Pepsi’s bottled water and tap water.

Greater Boston spends 1,364 times the cost of perfectly good public water for Aquafina, despite indistinguishable differences, and Bostonians are not alone. Similar patterns repeat themselves across the United States.

Other scientific studies show that bottled water is no safer than public water, and often less safe, sometimes with high concentrations of toxins like arsenic and mercury. Food and Drug Administration rules for bottled water quality are quite poor compared to Environmental Protection Agency rules for tap water. But if bottled water is not necessarily cleaner or safer than public water, why have bottled water sales doubled in the United States over the past decade? And why do one of six people in the United States only drink bottled water?

The industry, led by Pepsi, Nestlé, and Coke is trying to dupe us. Misleading advertising is fueling the explosive growth of this industry. According to the most recent statistics available, in 2002 bottled water corporations spent $93.8 million to portray their products as “pure,” “safe,” “clean,” “healthy” and superior to tap water.

They position bottled water as healthy, when in reality it threatens our health and our ecosystems, costs thousands of times what tap water costs, and undermines local democratic control over a common resource.

Water bottling, is a fast-growing $55 billion a year business. Corporations take water from underground springs and municipal sources without regard to scarcity or human rights, and are setting out to replace our public water with a high-priced, aggressively marketed product.

Increased demand for water worldwide is draining away our rivers, lakes, and other fresh water. Today, over 1 billion people around the world don’t have access to safe water to drink. Each year, more than 1 million children die of diseases caused by unsafe water. And as water scarcity grows, these numbers will rise. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s people won’t have access to enough water, putting the lives of millions more people at risk.

Corporations view water as one of the great investment opportunities of the 21st century, and increasingly seek to control it. Water is already a $400 billion a year business. That’s 30 percent larger than the pharmaceutical industry. If transnational corporations control our water, they can decide who gets it—and who doesn’t.

Just like air, water is precious and sustains all life on earth. Access to clean, safe water is a fundamental human right. Decisions about a life-giving substance and a fundamental human right must not be left to corporate shareholders unaccountable to the public.

Corporations like Pepsi, Coke, and Nestlé are seeking to transform water into a commodity that can be sold for profit to the highest bidder. Instead of buying into this approach, people across the United States should be demanding that our public water systems are well maintained. Clean, safe, public water is worth fighting for.

5.JIM CROW RETURNS TO THE VOTING BOOTH
DOES AMERICA HAVE AN APARTHEID VOTE-COUNTING SYSTEM? PART I.

BY

GREG PALAST

There are conspiracy nuts out there on the Internet who think that John Kerry defeated George Bush in Ohio and other states. I know, because I wrote "Kerry Won" for TomPaine.com two days after the election.

"Kerry Won" was the latest in a series coming out of a five-year investigation, begun in November 2000, for BBC Television Newsnight and Britain's Guardian papers, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.

On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com put the report out on the 'Net, I received an email from the New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, the Times reporter asked me pointed questions:

Question #1: Are you a "sore loser"?

Question #2: Are you a "conspiracy nut"?

There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, apparently, complete. The next day, their thorough analysis of the evidence yielded a front-page story, "VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED."

Here's a bit of what the Paper of Record failed to record.

In June 2004, well before the election, my co-author of "Jim Crow" Rev. Jesse Jackson brought me to Chicago. We had breakfast with Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards. The Reverend asked the Senator to read my report of the "spoilage" of Black votes-one million African Americans who cast ballots in 2000 but did not have their votes register on the machines.

Edwards said he'd read it over after he'd had his bagel. Jackson snatched away his bagel. No read, no bagel. A hungry Senator was genuinely concerned-these were, after all, Democrats whose votes did not tally, and he shot the information to John Kerry. A couple of weeks later, Kerry told the NAACP convention that one million African-American votes were not counted in 2000, but in 2004 he would not let it happen again.

But he did let it happen again. More than a million votes in 2004 were cast and not counted.

As a reporter, it's not my job to help the Democratic Party learn to tie its shoes. And, as a nonpartisan journalist, I'm not out to expose the Republican Party's new elaborate campaign to prevent voters from voting-but I must report it. However, editors and news producers in my home country, the USA, seem less than interested. Indeed, they are downright hostile to reporting this story of the shoplifting of our democracy.

America has an apartheid voting system, denying African-Americans, Hispanics and American Natives the assurance their ballots will count. Worse, America has an apartheid media which denies racial disenfranchisement a seat at the front of the news bus.

It was in November 2000 I first ran into the U.S. news lord's benign neglect of the "new Jim Crow" methods of denying citizens of color their vote. While working with the British Guardian papers just days before the 2000 presidential election, I discovered that Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katharine Harris, had wrongly purged tens of thousands of Black citizens from voter rolls as "felons"-when in fact their only crime had been V.W.B.: Voting While Black.

Nothing appeared in the U.S. press. However, I admit that the Florida purge story was picked up by the New York Times ... four years later.

Just before the November 2004 election, BBC television Newsnight discovered new, confidential "caging lists" which we got our hands on from inside the Republican National Committee headquarters. These were rosters of thousands of minority voters targeted to prevent them from voting on election day: a violation of federal law. It was big news in Europe and South America. In the USA, there was nothing except an attack on BBC's report by ABC's web site. ABC's only listed source for their attack on the BBC was the Republican Party.

The story of the purge of Black voters, the million missing Black ballots cast but not counted, the caging lists, and other games used to deny the vote to the dark-skinned and the poor, would have been buried long ago if not for BBC Television, Harper's Magazine (may it last a thousand years), Britain's Guardian and Observer, The Nation, the op-ed editors at the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and, provocatively, Hustler Magazine. Even if ignored or actively 'dissed by U.S. "mainstream" media, the story will be continue to be reported, due to the passionate insistence of Reverend Jackson, from a thousand pulpits.

Thanks to GeorgeBush.org for capturing the 'caging lists.' And bless the blogs, for they shall set the truth free: TomPaine.com, Buzzflash, Working-for-Change and other Internet sites carried the story over the electronic Berlin Wall.

Finally, my gratitude to our indefatigable investigative team, particularly Oliver Shykles and Matt Pascarella for their work on this story-on which they continue today-and to Meirion Jones, producer nonpareil at BBC television's Newsnight.

6. JIM CROW RETURNS TO THE VOTING BOOTH
DOES AMERICA HAVE AN APARTHEID VOTE-COUNTING SYSTEM? PART II

REV. JESSE JACKSON AND GREG PALAST

The inaugural confetti has been swept away and with it, the last quarrel over who really won the presidential election.

But there is still unfinished business that can't be swept away. After taking his oath, the president called for a "concerted effort to promote democracy." The president should begin with the United States.

More than 133,000 votes remain uncounted in Ohio, more than George W. Bush's supposed margin of victory. In New Mexico, the uncounted vote totals at least three times the president's plurality -- and so on in other states.

The challenge to the vote count is over, but the matter of how the United States counts votes, or fails to count them, remains.

The ballots left uncounted, and that will never be counted, are so-called spoiled or rejected ballots -- votes cast by citizens, but never tallied. This is the dark little secret of U.S. democracy: Nationwide, in our presidential elections, about 2 million votes are cast and never counted, most spoiled because they cannot be read by the tallying machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Cleveland State University Professor Mark Salling analyzed ballots thrown into Ohio's electoral garbage can. Salling found that, "overwhelmingly," the voided votes come from African American precincts.

This racial bend in vote spoilage is not unique to Ohio. A U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation concluded that, of nearly 180,000 votes discarded in Florida in the 2000 election as unreadable, a shocking 54 percent were cast by black voters, though they make up only a tenth of the electorate. In Florida, an African American is 900 percent more likely to have his or her vote invalidated than a white voter. In New Mexico, a Hispanic voter is 500 percent more likely than a white voter to have her or his ballot lost to spoilage.

Unfortunately, Florida and New Mexico are typical. Nationwide data gathered by Harvard Law School Civil Rights Project indicate that, of the 2 million ballots spoiled in a typical presidential election, about half are cast by minority voters.

The problem is that some officials are quite happy with the outcome of elections in which minority votes just don't count. They count on the "no-count."

Before last November's election, the American Civil Liberties Union sued five states for continuing to use punch-card machines, those notorious generators of "hanging" chads and "pregnant" chads that disproportionately disenfranchise black voters.

Four of those states settled with the ACLU by adopting simple fixes to protect voters. One state, notably, refused: Ohio, which forced 75 percent of its voters to use punch-card machines. In minority and low-income areas, these old machines on average spoil an unacceptable 8 percent of the votes cast on them. In high-income white districts, spoilage is typically 1 percent.

In Ohio, the decision to keep the vote-destroying machines in place in African American districts was made by the state's Republican attorney general, Jim Petro, and its secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, not incidentally, co-chaired the Bush-Cheney re-election committee. The election in Ohio was fundamentally flawed, a fact compounded by the widespread use of electronic voting machines susceptible to manipulation and hacking.

This election saw an explosion in a new category of uncounted, ballots: rejected provisional ballots. In Ohio alone, more than 35,000 of these votes were never tallied. Once again, the provisional ballots were cast overwhelmingly in African American precincts.

Why so many? In November, for the first time since the era of the Night Riders, one major political party launched a program of mass challenges of voters on Election Day. Paid Republican operatives, working from lists prepared by the party, fingered tens of thousands of voters in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, questioning their right to a ballot.

One of these secret "caging lists" was obtained by BBC Television from inside Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. Every one of the voters on those sheets resided in African American neighborhoods, excepting a few in precincts of elderly Jewish voters.

These lists helped Republican poll workers challenge voters on the basis of an alleged change of address. An analysis of one roster showed that several of those facing challenge were African American soldiers whose address changed because they were shipped overseas.

Challenged voters were shunted to "provisional ballots," which, in Ohio and elsewhere, were not counted on the flimsiest of technicalities.

Who won the presidential race? Given the millions of ballots spoiled and provisional ballots rejected, the unfolding mystery of the exit polls and widespread use of electronic voting machines, we will never know whether John Kerry or George W. Bush received the most votes in Ohio and other swing states

But we can name the election's big winner: Jim Crow.

Last Thursday, the president said, "Our country must abandon all the habits of racism."

From benign neglect of the voting machinery to malign intent in challenging minority voters en masse, the United States is turning that ill habit into an electoral strategy.

In 1965, Congress gave us the Voting Rights Act, promising all people the right to cast a vote. It is now time to making counting that vote a right, not just casting it, before Jim Crow rides again in the next election.

7. SECRET CODE CAN TRACK PRINTER USERS
BY

AUTHOR(S) UNKNOWN

The United States has struck a deal with selected colour laser printer manufacturers that allows for the tracking of printed material and their users, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says.

The EFF said on Tuesday that its researchers recently broke the code behind the tiny tracking dots, and said the US Secret Service confirmed that the tracking was part of a deal struck with selected colour laser printer manufacturers to identify counterfeiters.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF researcher Seth Schoen.

EFF said the yellow dots were less than one millimetre in diameter and could be seen only with a blue light, magnifying glass or microscope.

Lorie Lewis, a spokeswoman at the Secret Service, declined to confirm the report directly, but acknowledged that the agency "has worked together with other government agencies and industry on preventive technological countermeasures designed to discourage the illegal use of printers and copiers in the production of counterfeit currency".

Lewis said she could not elaborate on these measures, but said they were "specific and limited to the reproduction of currency" and that the action "in no way tracks or measures the use of a personal computer's hardware or software".

Disturbing implications

EFF, a group promoting privacy, free speech and technological innovation, said the news had disturbing implications for privacy even if the aim was to stop counterfeiting.

EFF spokeswoman Rebecca Jeschke said the same information could be used by governments to track down dissidents.

"Internationally, there are governments who would be very interested in what dissidents have to say and in tracking dissidents," she said.

Jeschke added that although the deal appeared to be with the US government, the fact that it was relatively easy to break the code would mean other governments could use the same codes for other purposes.

EFF broke a code in a Xerox DocuColor printer and identified other codes in printers from Canon, Brother, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and other makers.

And they noted that the codes are not limited to printers sold in the United States.

"We had test pages from Europe, and they do have the same codes on them," Jeschke said.

Xerox spokesman Bill McKee said the company would not comment on specific technology "for security reasons".

"Xerox does not routinely share any information about its customers," he said. "We, like any manufacturer, assist investigating agencies, when asked."

Backroom deals

Beth Givens of the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse said the report was troubling: "It begs the question about what other kinds of secret tracking mechanisms are out there," she said.

Givens said the system could threaten a basic right to remain anonymous.

"The right to leaflet goes all the way back to the birth of this country," she said. "If you print something on a colour printer, you're no longer anonymous.

"Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters," said EFF senior attorney Lee Tien.

"Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment such as printers.

"The logical next question is: What other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?"