Above the Law
Bush’s Racial Coup D’Etat and Intel Shutdown
Did Jeb Bush fix the Florida election long before any votes were cast? Did President Bush shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies’ investigations into terror networks prior to 9-11, leaving America wide open to the attacks?
In a conversation with GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappé, journalist Greg Palast breaks down two of the biggest scoops you’ve never heard and explains how they, and other groundbreaking stories, are ignored by most mainstream news outlets.
Palast is no conspiracy nut. His special investigations regularly lead the BBC’s Newsnight program. His bi-weekly column for London’s Observer newspaper has earned him numerous awards including the Financial Times David Thomas Prize. Last year, Salon.com selected his report on the U.S. elections as politics story of the year.
Yet despite all the props, Palast, an American, works in exile in London - unable to find work in what he calls the “gutless” North American media. Like the best muckrakers, he is angry, opinionated and armed with a tireless desire to expose the truth. His stories about Bush’s election theft and intelligence cover-up - both backed up with smoking gun documents, inside sources and on-the-record interviews - will shock even the most informed reader:
Lappé: Thanks Mr. Palast for talking with us today.
You have broken two major stories concerning President Bush in the last year - both of which have gotten little play here in the U.S. Let’s start out by looking back at Florida: Last week, the final report on the Florida recount funded by a consortium of various media outlets was released. They found: Bush would have won if you only recounted the counties the Gore team had requested, Gore would have won if it was statewide.
But prior to all this, you reported a story that looked into something that went down before the election that in many ways makes these findings insignificant.
What did you find?
Palast: Yeah, insignificant. No kidding. Maybe that’s what The New York Times sub-heading should be “All the news that’s insignificant we print.”
First of all, the story I broke was simple:
After looking at my evidence printed in Britain, the Civil Rights Commission said the issue is not the count of the votes in Florida – the issue is the no-count. What the commission meant by the no-count is that it looks like maybe 100,000 people, at least 80,000 people, most of them black, were not permitted to vote who had a legal right to vote in Florida.
That story was simply not covered in the U.S. press. And that is how the election was won.
I reported that story for the main paper of the nation. Unfortunately, it was the wrong nation. I reported that story for the Guardian newspapers of Britain, and its related sister paper The Observer, where I have a column on Sunday. I also reported it for BBC television at the top of the nightly news, but again, it was the nightly news of Britain where they found out who really won that election, just not in the U.S.
Here’s how they did it:
A few months before the election, Katherine Harris’ office used computer systems to make up a list of people to purge from the voter rolls of people who were supposedly felons – people who committed serious crimes and therefore in Florida were not allowed to vote. We now know those lists were as phony as a three-dollar bill. That maybe approximately 90% of the people on those lists, and there were 57,700 people on that list, approximately 90% were not felons and had the right to vote. Surprise, surprise. At least 54% of the names on that list were black. We know that because Florida is one of the few states under the U.S. Civil Rights Act that actually has to track the race of each voter.
They used this racial targeting system as a way to target and purge black voters. This was a very sophisticated Jim Crow operation done by computers, completely hidden from the public eye. And when they were asked about it they basically lied. The Governor, the Secretary of State, and the head of the Florida Department of Elections all lied under oath to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about how that was done.
Now that was completely covered in the British and European press. That is one of the reasons why when Bush came over to Europe he was seen as a usurper and a pretender to the presidency - not elected, but a guy who had conducted a sort of racial coup d’etat.
He was not seen as legitimate.
The U.S. press did little bits of the story and then buried it. My sister paper the Washington Post, (the Guardian papers co-publish with the Washington Post) did run my story, buried, 7 months after the election. I wrote the story within 3 weeks of the election and they didn’t publish it until seven months later, when it didn’t really mater. And they only published it because the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said my findings were correct. If I didn’t have that official approval, I don’t think we would have seen that story at all.
And now these newspapers, including the Washington Post and The New York Times, spent easily a couple of million dollars doing what they called a “recount.” But in fact it was not a recount. There were 180,000 votes in Florida that were never counted on order of Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State. These were 180,000 votes that were never counted because they had some kind of technical error in them – like a stray mark in it, or someone circled Al Gore’s name instead of punching a hole, and it was not counted as an Al Gore vote.
Now you have to know I did not support Al Gore, I am not here carrying his flag. I don’t care if he was elected either way. That is not my interest. I am concerned about democracy.
The thing that those ballots showed was something very simple: by a notable majority the people in Florida voted for, and believed they voted for, and assumed their ballots would be counted for, Al Gore.
Now how in the heck after spending more than a million dollars and going through each of those ballots that these so-called news organizations decided that Bush would have won it anyway? What they said was under state of Florida rulings we exclude what people wanted to do, we exclude what we see on the ballots, and we go by the Florida rulings on what ballots should be excluded for technical reasons – and Bush wins. Well, we knew that. We knew that because Katherine Harris already said that Bush won on technical grounds. So we didn’t need to spend a million dollars.
We have to remember that these news organizations had this information for months and withheld it. And then in the middle of a war they release information and futsed with it so it looked like Bush would have won anyway, or it’s hard to see, or Bush would have won one way and Gore would have won another way. That’s nonsense. In a democracy the intent of the voter is all that counts. In fact, the U.S. took that position in two other elections in 2000: when Slobodan Milosevic disqualified ballots and therefore won the presidency of Yugoslavia we refused to recognize his government. And when Alberto Fujimori of Peru knocked out counting of rural ballots for technical reasons, once again the U.S. refused to recognize his presidency. The U.S. said you cannot win a presidency on a technicality. We said that for Milosevic and for Fujimori but somehow we didn’t say that to Mr. Bush.
It’s the votes that count in a democracy. If the votes don’t count then it’s not a democracy.
If you go to my web site, www.gregpalast.com, you can read my reports and watch the BBC reports for yourself. I also have a book coming out called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Pluto Press) which will be out in a couple of months in which I detail how they had planned to knock out the black voters well in advance and paid a Republican firm $4 million to come up with a computer program that would zoom in like a cruise missile and knock out these black voters.
They were so good knocking out black voters they should hire this firm to knock out bin Laden. They were so good at ferreting out democratic voters and purging them from the voter rolls, we should have turned them on Al-Qaeda and maybe that would have made a difference.
Lappé: Speaking of which, let’s jump to the present and to another bombshell you recently reported: that Bush has hindered the FBI’s investigation into various terrorist organizations. What did you find?
Palast: We obtained documents from inside the FBI showing that investigations had been shut down on the bin Laden family, the royal family of Saudi Arabia - and that is big because there are 20,000 princes in the royal family - and their connections to the financing of terrorism.
Now there is one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray sheeps in this family – which is a family of billionaires which is tied in with the Saudi royal household which appears to be involved in the funding of terrorist organizations or organizations linked to terrorism. If you go the BBC site you will see me holding up documents from the FBI talking about Abdullah bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and an organization called the World Assembly of Muslim Youth which may or may not be a conduit for funds to terrorists. Now the problem was the investigations were shut down. There were problems that go back to Father Bush - when he was head of the CIA, he tried to stop investigations of the Saudis, continued on under Reagan, Daddy Bush’s president, and it continued under Clinton too, but not as severely. What I was told by agents was that under Clinton agents were constrained but not prohibited from taking on these investigations into the Saudis.
Bush’s Racial Coup D’Etat and Intel Shutdown
Did Jeb Bush fix the Florida election long before any votes were cast? Did President Bush shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies’ investigations into terror networks prior to 9-11, leaving America wide open to the attacks?
In a conversation with GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappé, journalist Greg Palast breaks down two of the biggest scoops you’ve never heard and explains how they, and other groundbreaking stories, are ignored by most mainstream news outlets.
Palast is no conspiracy nut. His special investigations regularly lead the BBC’s Newsnight program. His bi-weekly column for London’s Observer newspaper has earned him numerous awards including the Financial Times David Thomas Prize. Last year, Salon.com selected his report on the U.S. elections as politics story of the year.
Yet despite all the props, Palast, an American, works in exile in London - unable to find work in what he calls the “gutless” North American media. Like the best muckrakers, he is angry, opinionated and armed with a tireless desire to expose the truth. His stories about Bush’s election theft and intelligence cover-up - both backed up with smoking gun documents, inside sources and on-the-record interviews - will shock even the most informed reader:
Lappé: Thanks Mr. Palast for talking with us today.
You have broken two major stories concerning President Bush in the last year - both of which have gotten little play here in the U.S. Let’s start out by looking back at Florida: Last week, the final report on the Florida recount funded by a consortium of various media outlets was released. They found: Bush would have won if you only recounted the counties the Gore team had requested, Gore would have won if it was statewide.
But prior to all this, you reported a story that looked into something that went down before the election that in many ways makes these findings insignificant.
What did you find?
Palast: Yeah, insignificant. No kidding. Maybe that’s what The New York Times sub-heading should be “All the news that’s insignificant we print.”
First of all, the story I broke was simple:
After looking at my evidence printed in Britain, the Civil Rights Commission said the issue is not the count of the votes in Florida – the issue is the no-count. What the commission meant by the no-count is that it looks like maybe 100,000 people, at least 80,000 people, most of them black, were not permitted to vote who had a legal right to vote in Florida.
That story was simply not covered in the U.S. press. And that is how the election was won.
I reported that story for the main paper of the nation. Unfortunately, it was the wrong nation. I reported that story for the Guardian newspapers of Britain, and its related sister paper The Observer, where I have a column on Sunday. I also reported it for BBC television at the top of the nightly news, but again, it was the nightly news of Britain where they found out who really won that election, just not in the U.S.
Here’s how they did it:
A few months before the election, Katherine Harris’ office used computer systems to make up a list of people to purge from the voter rolls of people who were supposedly felons – people who committed serious crimes and therefore in Florida were not allowed to vote. We now know those lists were as phony as a three-dollar bill. That maybe approximately 90% of the people on those lists, and there were 57,700 people on that list, approximately 90% were not felons and had the right to vote. Surprise, surprise. At least 54% of the names on that list were black. We know that because Florida is one of the few states under the U.S. Civil Rights Act that actually has to track the race of each voter.
They used this racial targeting system as a way to target and purge black voters. This was a very sophisticated Jim Crow operation done by computers, completely hidden from the public eye. And when they were asked about it they basically lied. The Governor, the Secretary of State, and the head of the Florida Department of Elections all lied under oath to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about how that was done.
Now that was completely covered in the British and European press. That is one of the reasons why when Bush came over to Europe he was seen as a usurper and a pretender to the presidency - not elected, but a guy who had conducted a sort of racial coup d’etat.
He was not seen as legitimate.
The U.S. press did little bits of the story and then buried it. My sister paper the Washington Post, (the Guardian papers co-publish with the Washington Post) did run my story, buried, 7 months after the election. I wrote the story within 3 weeks of the election and they didn’t publish it until seven months later, when it didn’t really mater. And they only published it because the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said my findings were correct. If I didn’t have that official approval, I don’t think we would have seen that story at all.
And now these newspapers, including the Washington Post and The New York Times, spent easily a couple of million dollars doing what they called a “recount.” But in fact it was not a recount. There were 180,000 votes in Florida that were never counted on order of Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State. These were 180,000 votes that were never counted because they had some kind of technical error in them – like a stray mark in it, or someone circled Al Gore’s name instead of punching a hole, and it was not counted as an Al Gore vote.
Now you have to know I did not support Al Gore, I am not here carrying his flag. I don’t care if he was elected either way. That is not my interest. I am concerned about democracy.
The thing that those ballots showed was something very simple: by a notable majority the people in Florida voted for, and believed they voted for, and assumed their ballots would be counted for, Al Gore.
Now how in the heck after spending more than a million dollars and going through each of those ballots that these so-called news organizations decided that Bush would have won it anyway? What they said was under state of Florida rulings we exclude what people wanted to do, we exclude what we see on the ballots, and we go by the Florida rulings on what ballots should be excluded for technical reasons – and Bush wins. Well, we knew that. We knew that because Katherine Harris already said that Bush won on technical grounds. So we didn’t need to spend a million dollars.
We have to remember that these news organizations had this information for months and withheld it. And then in the middle of a war they release information and futsed with it so it looked like Bush would have won anyway, or it’s hard to see, or Bush would have won one way and Gore would have won another way. That’s nonsense. In a democracy the intent of the voter is all that counts. In fact, the U.S. took that position in two other elections in 2000: when Slobodan Milosevic disqualified ballots and therefore won the presidency of Yugoslavia we refused to recognize his government. And when Alberto Fujimori of Peru knocked out counting of rural ballots for technical reasons, once again the U.S. refused to recognize his presidency. The U.S. said you cannot win a presidency on a technicality. We said that for Milosevic and for Fujimori but somehow we didn’t say that to Mr. Bush.
It’s the votes that count in a democracy. If the votes don’t count then it’s not a democracy.
If you go to my web site, www.gregpalast.com, you can read my reports and watch the BBC reports for yourself. I also have a book coming out called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Pluto Press) which will be out in a couple of months in which I detail how they had planned to knock out the black voters well in advance and paid a Republican firm $4 million to come up with a computer program that would zoom in like a cruise missile and knock out these black voters.
They were so good knocking out black voters they should hire this firm to knock out bin Laden. They were so good at ferreting out democratic voters and purging them from the voter rolls, we should have turned them on Al-Qaeda and maybe that would have made a difference.
Lappé: Speaking of which, let’s jump to the present and to another bombshell you recently reported: that Bush has hindered the FBI’s investigation into various terrorist organizations. What did you find?
Palast: We obtained documents from inside the FBI showing that investigations had been shut down on the bin Laden family, the royal family of Saudi Arabia - and that is big because there are 20,000 princes in the royal family - and their connections to the financing of terrorism.
Now there is one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray sheeps in this family – which is a family of billionaires which is tied in with the Saudi royal household which appears to be involved in the funding of terrorist organizations or organizations linked to terrorism. If you go the BBC site you will see me holding up documents from the FBI talking about Abdullah bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and an organization called the World Assembly of Muslim Youth which may or may not be a conduit for funds to terrorists. Now the problem was the investigations were shut down. There were problems that go back to Father Bush - when he was head of the CIA, he tried to stop investigations of the Saudis, continued on under Reagan, Daddy Bush’s president, and it continued under Clinton too, but not as severely. What I was told by agents was that under Clinton agents were constrained but not prohibited from taking on these investigations into the Saudis.