US military. Thus a classic “false-flag” operation, the downing of Columbia was designed to create grief and anger amongst the American “sheeple” so they would support the upcoming Iraq War. There was, as every good conspiracist knew, a precedent for such a dubious mission, Operation Northwoods, which had been drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and intended to blame Cuba if anything went amiss with John Glenn’s orbit of Earth in 1962.
• Aliens shoot down Columbia.
The official investigating body, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (which comprised independent experts from academia, the space industry, the military) mundanely concluded:
The physical cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminium structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and break-up of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.
Similar incidents concerning debris breaking off had occurred before, but never with major consequences. If, the CAIB determined, a proper analysis of the damage to Columbia had occurred while the craft was still in orbit, a rescue of the shuttle’s crew might have been effected, either by boarding Atlantis or undertaking an emergency spacewalk to attempt repairs to the left wing thermal protection.
As to the snaps of a purple ray hitting Columbia, the CAIB concluded that these were the result of camera wobble during a long exposure.
STOLEN ELECTIONS
It was the election that gave us the “hanging chad”.
The seventh of November 2000 was presidential election night in the US and just after 8.00 p.m. TV networks “called” the election for Democrat Al Gore when exit polls showed he had taken the key state of Florida.
A few hours later TV anchormen had to red-facedly retract the estimate. They weren’t the only ones to make retractions. At first Gore conceded the election to rival George H. W. Bush, then when Bush’s lead in Florida near disappeared, Gore withdrew his concession. Meanwhile, the votes in Florida were recounted by machine, by hand, and Republicans and Democrats alike threw court cases around like confetti. At one stage there were no less than thirty separate court cases underway concerning the Florida count.
Eventually, the US Supreme Court forced Florida to stop counting ballots and gave the state’s votes to Bush. As trial lawyer Vincent Bugliosi acidly observed, it was a “judicial coup d’etat” that allowed Bush to become the first Republican president for eight years.
Back in Florida, the air was also heavy with the smell of a political fix. Journalists and lawyers turned up dubious electoral practice after dubious electoral practice, beginning with the voting system in Palm Beach County where the punch card “butterfly ballot” was so flawed that 5,000 votes went to the unholy (and improbable) alliance of Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. Then there were the endless disputes over whether punch-card votes counted if bits of paper were left on the card—the infamous “hanging chads”. Over in Gadsen County, which had a high proportion of black and predominantly Democrat voters, there was an unfeasibly high excess of spoiled votes. There, ballot papers were read by an “Accuvote” machine which rejected any with extra marks on them. Unfortunately, the machine recording the votes made marks, meaning that around 15 per cent of Gadsen votes were discounted. In predominantly white Tallahassee, however, voters were warned about machine marks and asked to try again. The percentage of spoiled votes was 1 per cent.
Black voters were also on the dubious end of so-called “scrubbing”, as the USS Commission on Civil Rights discovered (see Document, p.510). In the run-up to the election Florida’s governor—who happened to be Jeb Bush, bro of George—and others commissioned a company called DBT to remove (“scrub”) from the electoral register convicted felons. This turned out to be a wholly flawed exercise because DBT’s computer did not include people’s middle initials, meaning there were numerous counts of mistaken identity. According to journalist Greg Palast at least 15 per cent of DBT’s scrub list was erroneous and, guess what, a disproportionate number of those were black or Hispanic. DBT’s computer might not have been sufficiently clever to record middle initials, but it could do race.
Talking of electronic errors, the voting machines in Volusia did very strange things on November 7/8. At first the Volusia machines gave Bush a 51,000 lead—the announcement of which started the “Bush victory” juggernaut —then apparently suffered a “memory error” which reduced his lead by 16,022. There were stories too of voting records hidden in the trash cans at Volusia County offices.
It was of course coincidence that the Volusia County machines were made by Diebold Inc., which just happens to be owned by Republican businessman Walden O’Dell. Diebold Direct Record Electronic machines are environmentally friendly, and leave no paper receipt. Meaning votes cannot be properly checked.
The cry of “stolen election” was heard again in 2004. Exit polls trumpeted a huge victory for Bush’s opponent, the lantern-jawed Senator Kerry. But somehow by midnight, Bush had taken the lead. This time Ohio was the state under scrutiny. From 12.20 in the morning until around 2.00 a.m., the flow of information in Ohio stopped and in that time Bush went from underdog to top dog, emerging with a 118,000-vote-plus official margin. “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale,” the oily
Robert Kennedy Jr, among many others disagreed: “Officials there [Ohio] purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, short- changed Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.”
Once again, electronic voting machines were in the main frame. Of the three private companies supplying electronic voting machines, three had close ties to the Grand Old Party (Republicans), one of them being Diebold. O’Dell had promised in an email to deliver Ohio to Bush. Ohio went to Bush. Coincidence? Or collusion.
The man in charge of vote counting in the state was J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell just happened to be the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election committee in the state. On the night of the election, Blackwell okayed a 124 per cent (!) turnout in two Republican precincts. But he was even busier in the run-up, challenging the credentials of 35,000 newly registered voters until a federal judge stopped him. On looking into the Ohio vote, Congressman John Conyers concluded that there had been “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio… caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell”.
The plot thickened. When a case alleging vote tampering in Ohio during the 2004 US election proceeded, one of the main witnesses, Republican IT guru Michael Connell, died in a plane crash. Connell had been involved in the setting up of a duplicate voting electronic counter for Blackwell so the latter could monitor the Ohio count in real time. The contract for the duplicate counter contained the stipulation that it must fit “a hardware VPN device [that] will allow access to a private network connecting the servers for database replication services as well as remote admin[istration]”.
Remote administration meant that the votes could be
Whether Connell was assassinated or not, the Florida and Ohio counts in 2000 and 2004 were better suited to a banana republic than a great democracy.
