BANGKOK, Thailand -- The six highest-ranking, U.S.-trained, military and police officers in this Southeast Asian nation presented themselves on Wednesday (September 20) as Thailand's new self-appointed coup leaders, warning people not to destabilize their junta, and promising to install a civilian interim prime minister within two weeks, so elections could be staged in one year.

They censored the media -- including blackouts of CNN and BBC satellite TV news broadcasts -- and banned public political gatherings.

Security forces reportedly arrested a handful of anti-coup demonstrators who unfurled a banner on Wednesday (September 20) which said: "Fasting in Protest Against the Destroyer of Democracy," but released them within hours, according to Thai media. They could suffer six months in jail and a 260 U.S. dollar fine.

Students calling themselves the "News Center for Student Activities" urged people not to cooperate with the "military junta" and to wear black to mourn the death of democracy, the Nation newspaper said.

Thailand remained calm.

"In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. . . . In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

Now that even Republicans are gagging on the war on terror, as lavish descriptions of psychosis-level torture seep into the mainstream - and as a flailing, unpopular president clings in the face of reason to his right to maintain a gulag of "enemy combatants" (for God's sake, George, most of them are innocent) - Americans are finding themselves on the brink of the moral debate they've been trying to avoid for the last, oh, 50 years or so. It's been brewing my whole lifetime.

Unless things have changed drastically since the June 13, 2004 NYT editorial "Gambling on Voting" was published, and all indications are that they haven't, I'll be voting by absentee ballot.

There needs to be a national regulatory standard for all electronic voting systems that is at least as robust as Nevada's regulatory standards for electronic gaming systems.

The Nevada State Gaming Commission has access to all gambling software, and this software is being contiuously spot-checked against copies of the software kept by the Commission. Incidentally, it is illegal for casinos to use any software not on file with the Commission. Gambling machines must be resistant to electrostatic shocks as high as 20,000 volts, and they must be physically tamper resistant. Any attempt to physically tamper with the machines locks the machine which must be manually reset after it has been shown to be operating properly. It has been demonstrated, repeatedly, that current electronic voting systems can be physically hacked, with no trace of the hack ever being made apparent.

Dear Mr. Cockburn,

I have often been called a conspiracy theorist myself for not accepting the readily available reasons the mainstream media likes to present for a variety of national and international issues.

I didn’t believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (largely because UN and American weapons inspectors said there were none), nor that there were links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; nor did I believe that George W Bush won the 2000 or the 2004 election fairly, all of which leads friends and acquaintances to call me (as they have done many times in the past) a conspiracy theory nut – even though I don’t really think questioning those incidents qualifies me as a conspiracy nut.

Experts across the country, from Princeton to MIT, have found serious security flaws in these electronic voting systems forced on us by HAVA (Help American "Vendors" Act). We citizens were forced to pay private corporations $3.8 billion to privatize our elections. "Privatize" in this case means the vote count is kept secret from public observation.  Electronic voting systems are unfit for use in any democracy. 

There are 120 ways to hack the vote on a computer; there are 5 ways to hack a Hand-Counted Paper Ballot system.  See the resource list below for links to these reports. At the very least, please read the executive summaries. 

Election integrity is a non partisan issue.  Republican Governor of Maryland, Bob Ehrlich, estimated electronic voting represents a 1000% increase in cost. HCPB is the most accurate, the most secure and by far the least expensive voting system.

We must return to a citizen count of paper ballots, at the precinct, before all who wish to observe. To participate in a Parallel Election being run in Central Ohio, contact me or my cohort, Marj Creech, at risenregan @ earthlink.net.