Some illuminating revelations from the Daily Times, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
WASHINGTON: The Advertiser, an Austrialian newspaper, has come out with some startling revelations about an Al Qaeda man, a French national, captured in Australia and now being interrogated by the French.According to a report published by the newspaper on 18 October, Willie Brigitte, the captured man, has told French investigators of his extraordinary journey from failed butcher to linchpin in an Al Qaeda plan to launch a terror attack on Australia. He has detailed the high-altitude paramilitary training he undertook in a vast camp overlooking the Himalayas in which he and thousands of jihad warriors were schooled in terrorism. He has told of how Osama Bin Laden’s allies have penetrated the Pakistani Army to thwart US efforts to crack terrorist training operations in the remote Pakistani mountain regions that border Afghanistan. A year after the French national was captured in a western Sydney apartment with documents indicating he was planning to launch an attack on Australian targets, his interrogation transcripts are said to have come into the possession of the Australian newspaper.
The transcripts are said to give a rare insight into how the networks of people prepared to join the Islamist jihad against the West function. Brigitte told investigators the camp where he was trained in the use of explosives, small arms and terrorism tactics was a sophisticated three-tiered mountain complex close to the Indo-Pakistani border. He was grouped with foreign recruits, including American and British citizens of Pakistani origin. “There were between 2,000 and 3,000 mujahideens,” Brigitte told French anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere. “I remember it was very impressive because we gathered every morning and shouted Allah Akbar. What was more, the site was imposing since one could see the outline of the Himalayas.” The camp was run by Lashkar e Taiba (LET). Brigitte said LET was filled with soldiers from the Pakistan Army who worked to sabotage efforts by the West to fight bin Laden and his allies.
“There was complete complicity between Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Army,” Brigitte said in a secret interrogation in the Paris judicial chambers of Judge Bruguiere on 3 December 2003. “Furthermore, the weapons were provided by the army. The munitions were brought in by night between the first and second levels (of the camp). “There was everything -munitions, arms and food. We had the feeling that these weapons came from the Pakistani Army...."
October 21, 2004
http://www.pottstownmercury.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13098474&BRD=1674&PAG=461&dept_id=18041&rfi=6
Voter fraud suspected in registration deluge
Sharon Spohn , 10/08/2004
READING -- A backlog of last-minute voter registrations in Berks County is pushing the system to its breaking point, according to election officials.
Director of Elections V. Kurt Bellman told the Board of Elections Thursday that there have been flagrant attempts at voter registration fraud.
"It’s absolutely out of hand," Bellman said. "Not only do we have unintentional duplication of voter registrations but we have blatant duplicate voter registrations."
Bellman said groups conducting voter drives are coming out of the woodwork, something Berks County hasn’t seen before. He added that some of the drives are being conducted in violation of the law because they are paying incentives to sign up voters.
Commissioner Mark Scott suggested the Board of Elections conduct its own investigation that would be public rather than create more work for the district attorney’s office.
"I’d like the public to get more access to the details of fraud," Scott said.
Bellman said his office has had numerous calls from people who were registered through a group called the Association Communication Organization for Reform Now (ACORN), complaining that those taking down the voter information deliberately put inaccurate information on the form.
Bellman said he also received a batch of registrations from Citizens for Consumer Justice in Allentown that contained several hundred forms, including ones that have been held since July and ones with fictitious names and addresses and even wrong counties.
Bellman said he believes it’s an attempt to overload the elections office.
"It’s election sabotage," Scott added.
Volunteers are working in the Board of Elections office throughout the day, in the evenings and even on weekends. County officials are asking volunteers to commit to a schedule for volunteering since county workers have to train each volunteer.
ACORN IS A LIB DEMOCRAT ORG!!
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/08/loc_voters08.html
Friday, October 8, 2004
Alleged fraudulent voter cards scrutinized
19 in Hamilton Co. suspected
By Cindi Andrews
Enquirer staff writer
Hamilton County election officials will meet this morning to discuss 19 voter registrations for people who may not exist, which would be a rare case of election fraud.
Board of Elections Director John Williams subpoenaed those named on the voter registration cards after similar handwriting and false addresses raised election workers' suspicions. The sheriff's department could not find them, he said.
The cards were turned in, Williams said, by someone affiliated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group that represents low-income people.
"We have a very extensive fraud detecting process," said Dierdre Murch of ACORN. "If this is true, I don't know how they got there."
Officials in Columbus are also investigating possible improprieties by an ACORN worker there.
ACORN has registered more than 1 million new voters nationwide, including 158,036 in Ohio, according to its Web site, www.acorn.org.
Murch said she took 526 new voter registrations to the board of elections late Thursday that the group found in a mismarked box and are asking the board to accept even though the deadline was Monday.
Ohio is under unprecedented scrutiny over its election process this year as a battleground state in what is expected to be a close presidential election. Unprecedented levels of voter interest also resulted in record numbers of new voter registrations.
State and local officials say those factors contributed to an unusually high number of potential election fraud cases. Lake and Summit counties are investigating over 1,000 potential instances of voter registration fraud.
By comparison, Hamilton County's 19 potential fraud cases out of the 68,728 new voter registrations tallied so far appear to be a pretty small number, Board of Elections Chairman Tim Burke said.
The Board of Elections can refer election fraud for prosecution if it decides there was malicious intent. It's a felony and carries a possible sentence of up to one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
The only other incidents Burke could remember in his dozen years on the board involved candidate petitions. In 2001, four women were sentenced to 30 days in jail each for signing fake names on petitions they were supposed to be circulating for would-be congressional candidate Jim Condit Jr.
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/9863680.htm?1c
Stash of voter cards probed
Former canvasser may be charged
BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press
When police at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport stopped a man for running a stop sign late last month, they found an unusual stash in his car trunk: More than 300 voter registration cards that had been filled out but never submitted to the Minnesota secretary of state.
The motorist allegedly told police that he was an ex-employee of ACORN, a group that has been conducting a voter registration drive in Minnesota for a year.
Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar said Thursday her staff is investigating allegations involving the man in connection with his voter registration work.
"Charges are likely to be filed next week,'' Klobuchar said.
A
CORN, which stands for Associated Community Organizations for Reform Now, boasts of having registered 1 million voters across the country since last fall. In Minnesota, the liberal group says it has registered 36,000 voters.
The man stopped at the airport is Joshua Reed, 19, of St. Louis Park. He faces two unrelated criminal charges, a felony drug case in Hennepin County and a misdemeanor shoplifting case being prosecuted by the St. Louis Park city attorney.
Now he faces an investigation that could lead to felony charges against him or perhaps others for violating election laws.
The law requires that cards be submitted to the secretary of state within 10 days of being filled out and signed, but the cards found in the car trunk were weeks or months old.
So far, Reed has not been charged with any crime in connection with the cards. He could not be reached for comment.
The airport traffic stop occurred Sept. 22. Reed was briefly taken into custody and then released.
After the stop, airport police seized the voter registration cards, and an investigator took them to the secretary of state's office, where workers photocopied the cards and returned them to police to hold as evidence.
Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer asked metro-area county election officials to accept the photocopies as valid registrations. Kent Kaiser, a spokesman for Kiffmeyer, said Thursday he presumed the counties would do so.
All but a handful of the affected voters, those whose cards became illegible because of water damage in the car trunk, apparently are now validly registered.
But there is another issue. The cards contained several pieces of sensitive personal data — signatures, driver's license numbers and full dates of birth — that would make them a lucrative target for anyone seeking to commit identity theft.
It was not clear whether any of that information was compromised.
Airport police refused to comment on the case. Klobuchar said she could not comment further, other than to say the airport police are doing the bulk of the investigation.
Much of what is publicly known about the case comes from a memo written by Bert Black, a legal analyst in Kiffmeyer's office. In the memo, Black said investigators told him that Reed "indicated he had been fired from ACORN for making copies of the cards."
Becky Gomer, the head organizer in Minnesota for ACORN, denied that Reed was discharged for copying cards. "That's absolutely not true," she said.
She said Reed was one of a number of canvassers whom ACORN paid $1 for each new voter registration they secured and, she said, ACORN supervisors discharged him because representatives of the county attorney warned ACORN that they suspected he was registering some voters twice to double his fee. "So we let him go," she said.
Minnesota Republican Party officials seized on the case Thursday to suggest that the voter registration system could be abused by employees or volunteers in any of the mostly Democratic groups conducting voter registration drives in Minnesota.
"This incident raises many other questions, including how many voter registration cards are sitting in the car trunks of ACORN employees?" Corey Miltimore, executive director of the state Republican Party, said on Thursday. "And why was this individual fired by ACORN?"
Gomer said there have been few problems with the registration cards collected by the ACORN canvassers.
"This is kind of a fluke thing," she said.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/epaper/2004/10/07/m1a_elections_1007.html
Voter registration process causes concern
Alleged irregularities in several counties are being probed.
By Dara Kam
Special to The Palm Beach Post
Thursday, October 07, 2004
TALLAHASSEE — Law enforcement officials are investigating voter registration irregularities in at least three counties in Florida, and election supervisors fear that the problem is so widespread it could lead to massive confusion on Election Day.
Third-party groups, including tax-exempt organizations known as 527s that engage in political activity, have been conducting voter mobilization drives in an attempt to persuade new or apathetic voters to turn out in support of their causes — mostly Democratic — on Nov. 2.
But problems with the applications, already reported to authorities in Miami-Dade, Duval, Monroe, Leon, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, could result in people who thought they had registered showing up at the polls only to discover they aren't eligible to vote.
Officials are investigating in Miami-Dade, Leon and Pinellas counties.
Of the forms collected by the voter mobilization groups, many are incomplete, have suspicious signatures or may have been forged, elections officials said Wednesday.
They have created an accountability problem that the legislature is expected to address in the session beginning in March, the incoming Senate president said.
Supervisors are concerned about "the quality and the timeliness of the work being received" and about the lack of accountability for the application-gatherers, said Bill Cowles, Orange County supervisor of elections and president of the statewide supervisors' association.
Supervisors have 15 days after the Oct. 4 closing date to report new registrations to the state Division of Elections. Potential voters whose applications were incomplete or unsigned are out of luck if they did not correct their forms by the deadline.
Applications bundled
Many of the third-party groups delivered bundles of applications, some collected as long ago as January, on the final day. Cowles said he received about 15,000 registration applications Monday, which he called "a disservice to voters."
"It is taking the control, the education and the accuracy of the work out of our hands," he said.
Voters who have not received registration cards by the end of October should call their elections office to check on the status of their applications and to find out where their polling places are, Cowles said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating voter registration irregularities in Miami-Dade County and anticipates more complaints as supervisors sort through the applications, a spokesman said Monday.
In Leon County, elections officials are investigating 1,500 applications, including many from Florida A&M University students that were photocopied. All were for registration as Republicans.
Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said most of the students contacted by his office indicated they had chosen "No Party Affiliation" and his office registered all of the applicants as independent.
In St. Petersburg, the state attorney's office is investigating allegations that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group pushing the minimum-wage ballot initiative, fraudulently changed party affiliations on voter-registration applications.
Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said she received dozens of applications collected by an unknown third party at a high school, all completed in the same handwriting and with similar signatures. LePore plans to send them to state elections officials but said the questionable applications left her in a quandary.
The 1995 National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter Act," took registration out of the exclusive domain of supervisors.
"It's also opened the door for fraud," LePore said. "We can't investigate unless there's something really glaring."
It is a third-degree felony to lie on a voter registration application, but state law provides for no penalty for those who sign up voters but do not hand in the paperwork or wait until the last minute, depriving voters of the opportunity to make corrections.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/100804/met_16854924.shtml
The Florida Times-Union
October 8, 2004
County finds 25 falsified voter registration forms
By DAVID DECAMP
The Times-Union
Duval County elections officials alerted state prosecutors Thursday to investigate 25 voter registration applications that turned out to be linked to bad addresses.
The forms had been processed and the voters registered. Erin Moody, elections spokeswoman, said the registrations remain valid until authorities conclude they are fraudulent. Officials have not determined whether the voter or someone else committed fraud. However, voters must sign an oath saying the registration is true.
Moody spoke with an investigator from the State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville to discuss the case and prepare a description of how the office has handled the forms. The forms remain at the downtown office.
"We're still at a very preliminary stage of the investigation. I just can't comment much," Assistant State Attorney Mac Heavener said Thursday night.
The elections office checks registrations using a computer to make sure addresses match acceptable ranges of street block numbers, Moody said. The computer accepts those -- like on the troubled forms -- that fall within the right range. If they don't, workers are alerted to square the problems.
Duval recently passed the 500,000 mark for registered voters, thanks largely to massive registration drives this summer. Independent groups and Republicans have worked aggressively to raise registrations in the state where 537 votes in a recount decided the 2000 election.
Asked whether more registration fraud complaints had been generated, Heavener said, "I can say there has been more interest in the 2004 election than there was in 2000. ... I can't specify a number of complaints."
The elections office learned of the questionable registrations through a tip. Moody declined to identify the tipster.
The Associated Press reported that it checked each address and found only one that matched an occupied house. Most of the addresses didn't exist. Residents at the occupied house said they moved in this week and did not know the person registered at the address. Other locales included a park, parking lot and utility building.
All but three of the individuals registered as Democrats. Two chose no party and one checked Republican.
All but two of the forms came from groups that registered groups independently. Moody declined to say which groups registered the voters.
Tait Sye, a spokesman for Democrat-supporting America Coming Together, said this week its registrations are checked for completeness and accuracy. ACT had registered voters in Duval.
Moody said none of the 25 forms is related to the 1,448 applications held back for being incomplete. Civil rights groups wanted a chance to contact or fix the registration before Monday's deadline.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=694&u=/ap/20041008/ap_on_el_pr/brf_ballot_error&printer=1
Bush, Cheney Left Off Mo. County Ballots
Thu Oct 7,10:01 PM ET
VAN BUREN, Mo. - Officials in one Missouri county are reprinting absentee ballots for the Nov. 2 general election after discovering that President Bush) and Vice President Dick Cheney () were left off.
The ballots were mailed beginning Sept. 21, and Carter County Clerk Becky Gibbs said several voters noticed the oversight.
"We are rectifying it," she said. "There was no intent to leave them off."
Fewer than 500 of the erroneous ballots were sent out, and some have already been returned.
Replacement ballots will be sent to everyone who requested an absentee ballot along with a letter explaining the error.
Terri Durdaller, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State, said that if absentee voters who previously returned a ballot send a new one, it will replace the previous one. If they don't return a new ballot, their first one will be counted.
"The key is just to make sure everybody does get the changed ballot," Durdaller said.
Ballots that other voters will use Nov. 2 have not been printed yet.
Gibbs said the cost to print replacement absentee ballots should be minimal.
A Hacker of a University in Calf. Arrested seams he had taped into a data base with over 1 million elderly who live with assistance ?????
Let’s not forget the Democrats who went into a GOP office and Broke an arm of a GOP worker??
New story on kerry ??
Cansoford PA. Kerry took over a couple of blocks for a photo op? Seams that he had the police declare enemata domain and took signs and stickers off cars and took the People out of their houses and made them stand in a blocked off area? Then bused his own people in???
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
GOD BLESS THE USA AND HER FIGHTING FORCES AND ALL WHO FIGHT WITH HER GIVE THEM STRENGTH,WISDOM,SIGHT AND COURAGE TO STAY THE COURSE TO DEFEAT THE ISLAMIC TERRORIST AND ALL WHO SUPPORT THEM AMEN
PS
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/10/21/93114.shtml
Thursday, Oct. 21, 2004 9:29 a.m. EDT
Dowd: Dems Already Looking Past Kerry to Hillary
While they still intend to vote for John Kerry, many Democrats are already resigned to his defeat and are looking forward to Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy in 2008, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said Thursday.
"I know a lot of Democrats I've talked to are really resigned," Dowd told radio host Don Imus. "They've sort of moved on in their heads to Hillary in 2008."
While the acerbic writer continues to fight the good fight on the Times op-ed page - bashing Bush with her trademark venom and hoping the charges stick - Dowd's off the cuff observations suggest she's given up on Kerry as well.
"Kerry's problem seems to be a Gore-like problem," she complained. "He's a loser even when he's winning. Kerry won all three debates but then he somehow is behind Bush in the polls afterwards. That's not who you want as your candidate, you know, a winner who's a loser."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UAGUNLWJCCYKKCRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=6548408
Retired U.S. General Attacks Kerry Over Bin Laden
Tue Oct 19, 2004 09:09 PM ET
By Will Dunham
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/kaplan
WHAT DO YOU THINK PETA THINKS ABOUT KERRY KILLING A GOOSE??
REMEMBER THAT CAIR DID A POLL AND 76% OF MULSUMS ARE VOTING FOR KERRY
THEY DON'T CAIR ABOUT THE MAS GRAVES??
If everyone remembers, a few weeks back, there was discussion about the "Paintball Cell" in Virginia.
Lashkar e Taiba is the group:
The Paintball Cell
In what truly has to be one of the most idiotic defenses ever dreamt up, the lawyer for one of the eleven men accused of training to join a Pakistani terror group says that the men cannot be prosecuted because the US has "indirectly" supported the group.
The claim from defense lawyer Stanley Cohen came as eight of the 11 men pleaded innocent in U.S. District Court to charges of conspiracy, firearms violations and commencing an expedition against a friendly nation. The other three defendants remain at large.
Prosecutors say the men were training to join and support a group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which wants to violently oust India from Kashmir and was labeled a terrorist organization by the government in December 2001.
Cohen, a lawyer for defendant Randall Todd Royer of Falls Church, told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema that the U.S. government has essentially supported Pakistan and its intelligence agency in its dispute with India over the Kashmir territory, despite an official position of neutrality.
The charges against the 11 men stem primarily from violations of the federal Neutrality Act, which bars citizens from engaging in hostile actions against nations with whom the U.S. is at peace. Cohen said the Neutrality Act can't be used because the U.S. has in fact favored Pakistan over India.
"The government has not been neutral with respect to Kashmir for more than 15 years," Cohen said.
Cohen further stated that the Pakistani intelligence agency has supported the Lashkar terrorist group, and that he will be demanding classified reports from the U.S. government to support his contention.
First of all, the "indirect support" the US may have given Lashkar was CIA funding of the Afghani mujahedin in its war against the Soviet Union. This "support" ended after the Soviet Union was defeated.
Mr Cohen is wrong about US favoritism of Pakistan over India. The US has been even-handed in dealing with both countries over the Kashmir issue, which became a nuclear tipping point once the Pakistanis, like the Indians, nuked up.
The only point that Mr Cohen is correct on is the ISI's support of Lashkar. And Lashkar wasn't the only terror group that the Paks were training (in Afghanistan), funding and arming to fight their proxy war against the Hindus in Kashmir.
The most important aspect of this case is who, exactly, Randall Todd Royer is and what, exactly, Lashkar-e-Taiba is.
Front Page Magazine reports that Royer "has served as a communications specialist and as a civil rights coordinator for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)."
CAIR is funded by Saudi Wahhabi money.
Lashkar is Wahhabist to the core. Lashkar is the armed wing of Markaz Dawa al-Irshad, which is a member of UBL's International Islamic Front For Jihad Against the US and Israel.
The Markaz was founded in 1987, at the inspiration of Osama bin Laden, by Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz Mohammad Saeed of the University of Engineering and Technology of Lahore and Abdullah Azam of the International Islamic University, which has been funded by bin Laden.
As regards ideology, the Markaz, an Ahle Hadith organisation of Wahhabi orientation, was initially very close to Saudi Arabia, but seems to have developed differences with it because of its proximity to Osama bin Laden and of its contention that even Saudi Arabia does not have an ideal Islamic society. Its criticism of the stationing of US and other Western troops in Saudi Arabia also contributed to this. It describes the Hindus and Jews, in that order, as the main enemies of Islam and India and Israel as the main enemies of Pakistan. Its Amir [Saeed] is a strong opponent of Western-style democracy.
The Amir [Saeed] said in an interview to the "Herald": "Democracy is among the menaces we inherited from an alien government. It is part of the system we are fighting against. Many of our brothers feel that they can establish an Islamic society by working within the system. They are mistaken. It is not possible to work within a democracy and establish an Islamic system. You just dirty your hands by dealing with it. If God gives us a chance, we will try to bring in the pure concept of an Islamic Caliphate."
Even though the eleven men have not been accused of planning attacks in the US, considering their affiliation to Lashkar and Lashkar's al-Qa'ida connection and Wahhabi philosophy, it is not, I believe, a reach to consider them a threat to America.
www.thecommandpost.com
'tis very strange that the bbc would air a documentary claiming al qaeda to be a myth
perhaps these interrogations are a myth. perhaps 9/11 didn't happen -- though i saw it with my own two eyes and one of my buddies perished upon impact of the first plane. but then, who am i? certainly not anyone as sophisticated or smart as the al-qaeda-deniers
Interesting that Briggite's revelations on the pakistani armed forces bear out bernard henri levi's own conclusions in his book " who killed daniel pearl".