Daniel Hopsicker: The Big Fix 2004 (Part 3)

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A retired CIA agent, whose illegal and unfettered access to election rolls in Martin County Florida was a major source of legal contention after the 2000 Election, traveled to the Ukraine four years earlier to teach ''grass-roots politics'' to people there, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.

The news came even as citizens in the Ukraine celebrate their new-found freedom, while in the U.S. suspicion continued to fester that vote fraud may have cost Americans their own right to free and honest elections.

In a bitterly ironic twist, Charles Kane, former Director of Security at the Central Intelligence Agency, and member of the Florida Republican Executive Committee, spent four days in Kiev, the capital of the former Soviet republic, hosting training sessions for Ukrainian political parties in 1996.

Institute officials chose Kane to go to the Ukraine, according to the February 20, 1996, Stuart/Port St. Lucie News, apparently straight-faced, “because of his experience in grass-roots campaigns.”

Four years later, Kane’s credentials as a proponent of democracy were receiving much closer scrutiny...

“Kane's efforts were part of a sinister underground conspiracy to help Bush,” Edward Stafman, attorney for the Martin County challengers told the Associated Press on December 7, 2000.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Like the virtually-unpublicized fact that 9.11 ringleader Mohamed Atta’s sojourn in Hamburg was paid for by U.S. taxpayers (through the joint US-German Congress-Bundestag Program), Charles Kane’s Ukrainian trip was sponsored by the U.S. Government, this time through the International Republican Institute, which reports have accused of being responsible during the current election for “many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars funneled” in support of the U.S.’s preferred candidate.

The career of the much-traveled Kane, it must be stated, resembles nothing so much as a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream... He was also involved, years earlier, in the investigation into the JFK assassination, dispatching a memo to the FBI regarding the whereabouts on the day of the assassination of notorious pipe-smoking Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.

The Seeds of Destruction

Kane’s strange—and in the case of the 2000 U.S. election crucial—involvement in two separate elections half a world apart came to light during an investigation into election “anomalies” which might explain why the company which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any national pollster, Zogby International, could have been so wrong in 2004 in predicting a 100 electoral-vote triumph for Kerry.

Memories of the Martin County, Florida debacle, over Republican officials allowed illegal access to election rolls in 2000, came to mind after reading Wayne Madsen’s controversial recent reporting of a mysterious $29 million slush fund allegedly behind a conspiracy to steal the 2004 Presidential election by retired CIA and FBI agents.

Charles Kane had been both.

More importantly, he had been shown to have had been given unfettered access to election data, which is at the heart of Madsen’s contention that the election was stolen.

So while most eyes were rightly focused on the increasingly suspect vote count in Ohio, we turned our attention to a place described by an early Spanish explorer as being “filled with bogs and poisonous fruits, barren, and the very worst country that is warmed by the sun.”

Like a hurricane slicing through a trailer park, Florida cut a swath of destruction through Democratic hopes in each of the past two Presidential elections.

We wanted to know if that outcome had been, somehow, “seeded” or “engineered.”

The Ghost of Scandals Past

Charlie Kane’s presence in both the Ukraine and the 2000 election debacle prompted us to take a quick backward glance at the controversy which became familiar during the weeks following the infamous Florida Vote Snafu of 2000.

Two heavily Republican counties in Florida had allowed party officials access which they said was to fix hundreds of flawed absentee ballot applications that had been submitted by voters but rejected by the elections office.

The Martin County supervisor of elections, a Republican, let Republican Party workers take away the ballot requests on a daily basis, add missing voter identification numbers and resubmit them, a deputy elections supervisor said.

Just days before the Nov. 7 election, Charles Kane and his buddy Thomas Hauck were laboring in front of a computer at the local Republican headquarters in Stuart, supposedly as part of their party's sophisticated but botched statewide effort to get out the absentee vote.

A printing company had failed to put the required voter identification numbers on thousands of absentee ballot request forms that were mailed to voters. So Hauck and Kane got busy in Martin County, aided by a Republican supervisor of elections who let them remove forms from her office.

Kane, who chaired the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign in Martin County, supposedly read the numbers from the party's database. Hauck, the local GOP treasurer and a 20-year veteran of local campaigns, supposedly filled in the blanks on the request forms.

But the printing company’s forms were used state-wide. Had this perhaps "convenient" fact been used as an excuse to allow illegal access in other places in Florida as well?

The question was never answered.

Once Again, in Tallahassee

Moreover, while Gov. George W. Bush edged Vice President Al Gore by 56 percent to 44 percent in Martin County, the absentee votes—control of which violated the rules of chain of custody—broke nearly 2 to 1 for Bush. This strange disparity had an echo in the 2004 election in Florida, which we will soon take up.

Other tantalizing clues have emerged, like the recent statements made by Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, which, curiously, encompasses both Martin as well as Palm Beach County, where the vote count has been disputed in an analysis by UC Berkeley researchers.

Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how.

Perhaps the proof of vote tampering, if proof is ever found, will be found by piercing through the implausible explanation offered for Charlie Kane’s illegal access to election records, and then collating it with whatever the truth turns out to be about the 'goings-on' in Tallahassee, home of the heart of Florida’s election machine, the central tabulating computer, on the day before the 2004 election.

Authorities there evacuated the headquarters of state election officials over a suspicious ticking package which turned out to be just “papers flapping in an air vent.”

An Echo (Not a Choice) in Ohio

Similarly, citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County Ohio officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.

This is odd. If you wanted to rig an election, the easiest path would seem to involve the fewest people.

Creating some "crisis" which takes people away from the crime scene would be key.

Only two states would need to be controlled illegally: Ohio and Florida. Curiously, in both there occurred still-unexplained events which may have impacted the result of the election.

In Ohio there was the famous "Warren County Lockdown" because of "terror" threats, and in Florida, a "bomb threat" at the State Elections Office in Tallahassee

The State Elections Office in Tallahassee holds, of course, that state’s main tabulating computers.

Numerous election experts have testified to the ease with which unsupervised access to the main tabulating computers before the actual election could be used to “hack the vote.” In an environment with no meaningful oversight and no paper trail, vote tampering, they state, can occur virtually undetected.

One expert on the technical aspects of electronic voting stated a typical concern...“There are virtually no limits to the way votes can be distributed... Programmers can write code that is self-erasing and redistributes votes to conform to whatever outside interests are operative, and without any kind of traceability."

And a Johns Hopkins University study researchers noted: "Software flaws in a leading US electronic voting system could be used to subvert the outcome of an election."

A mysterious rattle

With this in mind compare two typical quotes from mainstream stories:

“The Republican-dominated (Warren Ohio) County threw out all the media and independent vote watchers when votes were being counted at the end of Election Day, claiming ‘homeland security’ issues.”

“State elections workers got off to a slow start this morning after Tallahassee police evacuated their building. Investigators called in the bomb squad after finding a suspicious package.”

The events seem strangely similar. Moreover, the explanation given in Florida lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, we discovered, after reading all the news clips…

“As if Florida's election system weren't already stretched enough, employees in Florida's main elections office in Tallahassee arrived at work Monday morning to find their building surrounded by police and a bomb squad truck parked out front. A security guard had reported a suspicious package that appeared to vibrate in a storage room for the state's archives, which share the… building.

“The package was discovered in an area that stores quilts and other artwork that is part of the department's historic archive.”

The package turned out to be a bundle of documents, supposedly being blown by an air vent.

The mysterious rattling noise was caused by an air vent that was blocked by the box of papers?

Had the box changed position on the morning before the election? Had the air vent?

“Calling out the troops” to protect Florida’s collection of quilts seems a dubious excuse… made far more suspicious by the unfortunate box’s proximity to the state’s central tabulating computer on the even of the election.

They must be some really important quilts.

NEXT: What does the challenge to a gambling initiative allowing slot machines at South Florida race tracks and jai alai frontons in Broward County show about the massive vote fraud alleged to have taken place in the 2004 Presidential Election?

The deposition of Michael Roy Fugler grows in importance with word that Adnan Khashoggi is currently in Florida. Please help us pay for it by making a donation to our defense fund.

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- Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. About the author. - Email the author.

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