Phase transition
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In physics, a phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase to another. The distinguishing characteristic of a phase transition is an abrupt sudden change in one or more physical properties, in particular the heat capacity, with a small change in a thermodynamic variable such as the temperature. Examples of phase transitions are:

• The transitions between the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases (evaporation, boiling, melting, freezing, sublimation, etc.; see also vapor pressure)
• The transition between the ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases of magnetic materials at the Curie point.
• The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature.
• Quantum condensation of bosonic fluids, such as Bose-Einstein condensation and the superfluid transition in liquid helium.
• The breaking of symmetries in the laws of physics during the early history of the universe as its temperature cooled.

Complex systems change as energy is added or removed from them. This change may not be obvious until the system hits the critical point of phase transition. At that moment, the system reorganises itself into a new order, finding an equilibrium where before there was instability and chaos.

A simple example is what happens to water as energy (heat) is added or removed from the system. Add heat and the water will warm gradually, finally beginning to bubble, and ultimately, turning into stream. The steam is the same chemical compound, H20, but with a different structure between the molecules. The transition to steam, the phase transition, happens "all at once" within definite conditions.

Remove heat from the water and it will become ice when it hits the freezing point. Once again, the chemical compound is the same, but the structure of the molecules is different. Once again, the transition is "at all once". The water leaps from a liquid state to a frozen state.

We are surrounded by such complex systems: the economic system, the political and social systems, the Earth's climate, the geology of the planet. These are all complex systems that work in ways analogous to that of water, with an important difference: we know enough about water to know that it can pass from a frozen state to a liquid state and then to a vapor. We know the qualities of each of these states. We know the critical points at which this occurs: 32° fahrenheit or 0° celsius is the transition point between solid and liquid, and 212° fahrenheit or 100° celsius between liquid and vapor.

We do not have such an exact knowledge of manmade systems, nor of the climate, nor of our Earth's geology, but we can hypothesise that they too experience their own "phase transitions". While it is not easy to predict what state such systems might transition to, we can look at the various manmade and natural upheavals that have occurred throughout history and use them to predict possible future events. Unfortunately, what we find does not make for reassuring reading.

Today, there is a general malaise among people from all parts of the planet. People sense that these are turbulent, unstable times, that the systems in which we are embedded are beginning to act in ways heretofore unseen. The Ring of Fire in the Pacific appears to be awakening as volcanoes and earthquakes there become more and more regular events. Many observers think that the US economy has been propped up for political reasons during the last months, if not years, in order to maintain the illusion of prosperity to return GW to the White House. The international political system has received important shocks since the neo-con job of 911, with the US openly proclaiming itself a new empire that will brooke no interference in its plans to dominate the world. At the same time, other analysts believe the US is already overstretched and will be unable to maintain its hegemony for long.

We see that more and more people are worried for their own future and for the future of their children. Even if they are unable to put this into words or accurately describe the reasons for their discomfort, they sense that something is seriously wrong. There is less and less faith in "economic security" as people see shops and businesses close or "restructure", putting employees of long date and a certain age out on the streets where jobs are scarce but the need to survive and support a family remain real and pressing. At the same time, the divide between rich and poor increases with each year, and freak weather is becoming more and more the norm.

It feels as if the water around us is beginning to bubble, a bit here, a bit there; we are on the verge of boiling.

The study of history tells us that such moments are periods of chaos; the old order can no longer hold and people look for someone to tell them what is coming. They need to be reassured in a period when reassurance is impossible.

What are the means most often used to bring equilibrium back to the system? Revolution, war, the arrival of dictators and strongmen to seek to impose their will over a confused and muddled population, a population that cannot see its way out of the crisis and so is looking for a savior, someone with the answers. During such periods, rights and liberties are suppressed. War, disease, natural catastrophe, and hunger kill millions. It is as if the energy needed to create this new equilibrium is the very life force of humanity.

We are in a period of phase transition. George W. Bush has just been returned to the White House to complete his theocratic revolution. His lies have been legitimized. Americans have decided that it doesn't matter if their leader is a lying, dishonest, manipulator. He has been given carte blanche to continue down the path towards chaos and destruction, with the added fact that he does not have to worry about being re-elected in 2008. If the US of today bears little resemblance to the country Bush took over four years ago, we think that the changes his administration is planning for the next four years will be even more radical and drastic. Will there even be elections in four years?

As things deteriorate, some will lose their illusions, others will look for a new and better illusion. We think it is time to work to see the world as it is. The signs tell us that we are entering a phase transition. The way down, to continue with our analogy with water, would be towards a solid, a structure where the links are tight, where movement is limited and fixed. Bush's political agenda fits such a description: the USA Patriot Act, the imposition of fundamentalist Christian ideology, the demonization of other points of view. Bush would lead the world to a closed and homogeneous society, where the values of a small number of Americans become the values, not only for other Americans, but for the whole world.

However, if we look up, towards the other critical point of phase transition, to extend the analogy, if we try to imagine a world of vapor, what might that be? If Bush seeks to impose a common illusory ideology and belief system on everyone, what would be the opposite?

Might it be a world where each opinion, based upon critical thought and a desire to see the world objectively, is valued because it contributes to the understanding of the whole? Where each individual takes responsibility for his or her own life, thoughts and ideas, and actions, rather than having them dictated by the media, friends and family, or the church?

There is no one to get us out of this mess but ourselves. The water is beginning to bubble. Is there time? The one thing that is certain is that none of the old ways out will work. There are no political, social, or economic solutions. International treaties on cutting back emissions will not work. Saving the rainforests, vegetarianism, idealist slogans from the left and right, none of these will work.

It is time for each of us to look deep within ourselves in order to discover what we have to give back to the world, what vein of creative energy we can tap into to bring something new to a realm dying under the weight of our old ways. In the face of chaos, we must learn to hold our own, to maintain a clear regard upon the only solid thing around us - the truth.

If the truth we must understand is the truth of chaos and catastrophe, so be it. We have, as a species, obviously not yet learned its lessons. As we enter the phase transition, it appears that we are destined for the privileged position of studying it very closely from the inside.

In August of 2003, Walden O'Dell, Chief Executive of Diebold Elections Systems, the company that supplied America with 75,000 voting machines for Tuesday's election (including Ohio), told Republicans in a fundraising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." What kind of a statement was that? Did Mr O Dell really mean what it sounds like he meant?

In light of this, does anyone find it strange that, for this election, Ohio took the place of Florida as the state where the winner was ultimately decided?

Does anyone find it strange that battleground states employing electronic voting saw Bush's vote up to five percent higher than their exit polls had forecast, While the exit polls of other states proved to be accurate predictors of the returns?

Does anyone find it strange that Bush was significantly behind in many polls in the run-up to the election yet ended up winning by a significant majority?

What about CNN's exit polling data for Ohio as of 12:21am on November 2nd: 51% of men and 53% of women were voting for Kerry, and 49% of men and 47% of women were supporting Bush. One hour later however update of the same page showed that Kerry has fallen to 47% and 50%, while Bush is up to 52% and 50%?

Strange isn't it...although no one should be surprised given Bush/Cheney's track record.

By now there is categoric proof that the 2000 election was stolen and the only thing that changed for this election is the relative seamlessness with which the crime was committed. There is however enough evidence to yet again condemn BushCo for the fascist dictators that they are.

Kerry of course is no better and by capitulating and peddling the lie that he had lost Ohio, he merely confirmed that he and the Bush gang take their orders from the same master. Kerry played good cop to Bush's bad, and the American people have fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

As for the question posed by the Daily Mirror in our picture of the day: the answer is that, while many millions of Americans are indeed "dumb", it is unlikely that the majority are dumb enough to elect a confirmed liar, so the liar simply had to cheat.

Here's the evidence:

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state.

Today the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through
completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

Zogby International's 2004 Predictions
(as of Nov. 2, 2004 5:00pm EST)

2004 Presidential Election

Electoral Votes:

Bush - 213

Kerry - 311

SACRAMENTO, California –- After harshly chastising Diebold Election Systems for what it considered deceptive business practices, a California voting systems panel voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that the secretary of state decertify an electronic touch-screen voting machine manufactured by the company, making it likely that four California counties that recently purchased the machines will have to find other voting solutions for the November presidential election.

The panel also voted to send the findings of its recent Diebold investigation to the state's attorney general for possible criminal and civil charges against the firm for violating state election laws.

Following a contentious six-hour hearing during which the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel grilled Diebold president Bob Urosevich about his company's business practices, the panel voted to recommend decertifying the Diebold AccuVote-TSx machine, which was used for the first time in California during the March primary in Kern, San Joaquin, Solano and San Diego counties.

The decision was based partly on the fact that a peripheral device for the machine performed poorly in the March primary and partly on the fact that Diebold had marketed and sold the TSx to counties before it was certified by the state. The panel also said Diebold misled the state about issues pertaining to the federal certification of the system.

The state had conditionally certified the TSx in December so that counties that had already purchased the machines could use them in the March primary. But the company installed a last-minute peripheral device in several California counties that was still being de-bugged days before the March primary. The device, a smart card encoder that programmed voting cards to be used with the TSx, malfunctioned and produced major problems in San Diego and Alameda counties the morning of the primary. Several hundred precincts failed to open on time, thus disenfranchising voters who were turned away from the polls.

The decertification recommendation goes to California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who has until April 30 to decide how to act on it, a date that falls within the six-month advance notice that the state must give counties to take machines out of commission before an election.

The panel also recommended that Shelley ask the state attorney general to examine the possibility of bringing civil and criminal charges against Diebold for violating California election codes, which state that vendors cannot change software without notifying the secretary of state's office. The codes also say that no vendor can install uncertified software on voting systems.

Last November, the state discovered that Diebold had installed uncertified software on its voting machines in 17 counties without notifying state officials or, in some cases, even county officials who were affected by the changes.

Diebold said it was not entirely responsible for the installation of uncertified software and systems in California because changes in certification practices at the federal level had caused delays with certification and that state rules about certification were confusing.

But state undersecretary and panel chairman Mark Kyle said the company's excuses rang "hollow" and that the state's rules were extremely clear. He expressed anger that Diebold had been deceptive about advance knowledge of problems with its smart card encoder before the March primary. He also accused the company of "switch-and-bait" tactics in trying to pass off uncertified software as certified software and suggested that the company might have colluded with the federal testing lab, Wyle Laboratories, to get its system through the California investigation.

Panel member Marc Carrel, assistant secretary of state for policy and planning, said that Diebold's "spin" on the issues left him dizzy. He said that Diebold's repeated apologies were "belied by their actions and their statements."

"I keep hearing apologies. I keep hearing misleading statements. I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day -- it keeps repeating and repeating and repeating," he said. "I'm disgusted by the actions of this company."

Carrel said the "bait-and-switch" on software had resulted in the disenfranchisement of voters in various counties and resulted "in a reduction in the confidence not only in (touch-screen machines) but in voting in general. And that's very disturbing to me."

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.

In his invitation letter, O'Dell asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell.

They urged Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.

This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.

"Ordinary Ohioans may infer that Blackwell's office is looking past Diebold's security issues because its CEO is seeking $10,000 donations for Blackwell's party - donations that could be made with statewide elected officials right there in the same room," said Senate Democratic Leader Greg DiDonato.

Diebold spokeswoman Michelle Griggy said O'Dell - who was unavailable to comment personally - has held fund-raisers in his home for many causes, including the Columbus Zoo, Op era Columbus, Catholic Social Services and Ohio State University.

Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk said the party approached O'Dell about hosting the event at his home, the historic Cotswold Manor, and not the other way around. Mauk said that under federal campaign finance rules, the party cannot use any money from its federal account for state- level candidates.

"To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," Mauk said.

Griggy said in an e-mail statement that Diebold could not comment on the political contributions of individual company employees.

Blackwell said Diebold is not the only company with political connections - noting that lobbyists for voting-machine makers read like a who's who of Columbus' powerful and politically connected.

"Let me put it to you this way: If there was one person uniquely involved in the political process, that might be troubling," he said. "But there's no one that hasn't used every legitimate avenue and bit of leverage that they could legally use to get their product looked at. Believe me, if there is a political lever to be pulled, all of them have pulled it."

Greg Palast and Randi Rhodes reported today that the state of Ohio was stolen by the Republicans in election 2004. Ohio was the critical state that tipped the balance, giving the presidency to Bush.

Turns out one county in Ohio, equipped with electronic voting machines, reported NEGATIVE 25,000 votes.

Wha?!?

That’s what at least one election official in Ohio said. The votes from that County are lost. Not counted. GONE!

Republicans in both Ohio and Florida fought for 2 years to prevent a legal requirement for the black box machines to produce a paper ballot. Ohio finally said they would require a paper ballot, but not until 2006. [...]

It could be that the huge increase in voters in this election was because the American people like being lied to and deceived. It could be that the young vote came out to support an Administration that is sending their jobs off-shore, and sending the military to far flung
areas of the world where they are murdered almost daily by extremists.

Or it could be that the huge increase in voters was countered by an administration who came to power by stealing the Florida election in 2000, and now has the ability to skew electronic voting machines by hacking into the software that was left precariously vulnerable by the manufacturers of the machines. Remember the Diebold CEO who stated that he would do "everything in his power" to give Ohio to Bush?

The first report of one evening news show last night was on a woman in New Orleans that said she touched the Kerry box, but her machine recorded a Bush vote. But that wasn't enough. They also did the "Katherine Harris" DIRTY trick of denying democrats a ballot...140,000 of them in Ohio. By the way, the 57,700 democrats in Florida that were denied a ballot in 2000 are still off the voting rolls and could not vote this year either. The freedom to cheat is George W's favorite freedom.

Another wonderful display of Democracy.

Another fine win Mr. President.

As politicians and lawyers digest the result of the US presidential election, several groups have focused attention on the problems with electronic balloting that were reported by voters during the polls.

One hotline, run by the non-partisan Election Protection coalition, allowed people to call in and report problems they encountered when placing their ballot, including difficulties with e-voting machines. The glitches in electronic voting equipment stretched across the country and left many voters frustrated, according to activists.

The most common e-voting difficulty reported as the election got under way involved cases where voters claimed that the final summary screen indicated a candidate different from the one for whom they had voted. The problem raises significant concerns because it appeared across a variety of types of touch-screen voting machine, says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology policy group based in San Francisco.

But David Bear, spokesman for the leading e-voting equipment manufacturer Diebold Election Systems, believes that these voters had actually made a mistake, so the summary screen fulfilled its purpose by allowing them to double-check their selections. "That's what the summary screen is for," says Bear. He emphasizes that the electronic equipment undergoes stringent testing before reaching the polls. Voters that found the summary screen displayed an inaccurate selection could go back and fix their electronic ballot.

Other types of problems reported involved machines that indicated a candidate before the voter had made a choice. People also claimed to be unable to complete the voting process because the machine screens went dark.

"I think New Orleans wins the award for the worst voting situation in the country when it comes to electronic voting machines," says Cohn. A significant number of the city's machines did not boot up on time for a variety of reasons.

It was a problem that cropped up elsewhere as well. "But the difference between New Orleans and some of the other counties is that New Orleans hadn't prepared any back-up plan," says Cohn, "As a result they didn't have paper ballots or, frankly, anything to offer to voters when their machines didn't work, and they had to turn people away."

Tip of the iceberg

By the time polling began to wrap up on the East Coast, the Election Protection coalition says it had received over 600 reports of e-voting problems from across the country.

The number of reports is very low compared with the total number of voters who used the machines. But David Dill, founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and a computer scientist at Stanford University, California, points out that not everyone who experiences a problem will make a complaint.

"I think we can get a rough picture of how severe the problems are if we assume that a very small percentage of those voters are actually filing reports," he says.

Dill, like other election-rights activists, views these numbers as the tip of an iceberg.

A federal judge on Monday refused to allow the Akron Beacon Journal access to polling locations -- a practice the paper has enjoyed for years in its news-gathering role.

When she did the final check, lo and behold every vote was for the Democratic candidates except that it showed she had voted for Bush/Cheney for president/vice pres. She immediately got a poll official. On her vote, it was corrected.

She called the Travis County Democratic headquarters. They took all her information, and told her that she wasn't the first to report a similar incident and that they are looking into it

U.S. voters calling in to a toll-free number had reported more than 1,100 separate incidents of problems with electronic voting machines and other voting technologies by late Tuesday during the nationwide election.

In more than 30 reported cases, when voters reviewed their choices before finalizing them, an electronic voting machine indicated they had voted for a different candidate.
Advertisement:

E-voting backers called the number of reported problems minor in the context of almost 50 million U.S. voters projected to use e-voting machines on Tuesday.

In a majority of cases where machines allegedly recorded a wrong vote, votes were taken away from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, or a Democratic candidate in another race, and given to Republican President George Bush or another Republican candidate, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Copenhagen - Some observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a Europe-wide security and rights forum, were barred from entering some polling stations in the United States on Tuesday, one of them said.

"We were not allowed to enter polling stations," said Soeren Soendergaard, a Danish parliamentary deputy.

"Although we were officially invited to follow the (US presidential) election, the message was not passed on to the polling stations," he told the Danish news agency Ritzau.

He said he had been personally refused admission at three out of four polling stations in Columbus, Ohio.

"It's the limit of arrogance," complained the left-wing deputy, representing the 55-nation OSCE, a pan-European body of which the US is a member and whose duties include monitoring elections to ensure fair play.

Another Danish OSCE observer, conservative Carina Christensen, reported less serious irregularities in Jacksonville, Florida, but said police had been called when she tried to visit a Republican office.

She and three other delegation members had been well received by local representatives of the Democrat Party who had ensured their access to polling stations.

But Republicans were less welcoming. "We were denied entry to a local Republican office in Orlando," she told Ritzau: "They called the police, saying they had received guidelines from Washington to do so."

DALLAS - Long lines and stormy weather were the biggest hurdles most Texas voters faced on Election Day, but some voting machine problems were reported and an election judge accused of assaulting a federal election observer was replaced.

Dallas elections judge Julian Dean Helms was removed from his post early Tuesday after he pushed a U.S. Justice Department election observer out the door of his polling place, the Dallas County Sheriff's Department said.

The federal observer was one of two sent to the precinct based on past allegations of voting irregularities, sheriff's Sgt. Don Peritz Jr. said. Helms was replaced and the observers remained at the polling place.

Helms was not arrested and prosecutors were deciding whether to charge him with a crime. [...]

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."

- George W Bush in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack

It all boils down to Iraq. Will the majority of Americans reject George W Bush because of his defining moment - launching an indefensible preemptive war?

No matter what happens on election day - or days or weeks if the multibillion-dollar special again goes to the Supreme Court - the fact is that at least half of the nation, and the majority of its cultural and intellectual elite, has already rejected Bush as a divider, not a uniter, someone who did not even have a popular mandate to begin with. [...]

In a nutshell, we saw support for the Karl Rove-packaged, tough-talking, shoot-from-the-hip Bush in the red (Republican) states as a powerful expression of resentment toward the elite, a sentiment masterfully capitalized on by the Republican machine. Thus the Christian evangelist, God-fearing, anti-gun-control, anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell-research and anti-United Nations crusading armies defending true "American values". Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky or Mao Zedong never thought about this: working-class masses supporting a political party that lavishes tax cuts on the wealthiest 1% of the population and that is fully committed to destroying the civil institutions that support the working class.

These Bush-voting armies consider themselves under siege, are fiercely anti-intellectual (like the president himself) and in essence anti-modern. So no wonder this translates into a very ugly, aggressive brand of American nationalism. The "other" - especially the foreign Muslim other - is the ultimate enemy. The Bush administration's response to September 11, 2001, was a "war on terror", a misguided tactic (war) against a concept (terrorism). But the concept of "war on terror" was brilliant - because it inextricably linked this ugly, Bible-quoting American nationalism to the Republican agenda.

Thus Bush's mantra that there cannot be another commander-in-chief apart from himself: after all, he's on a mission from God. Thus his appeal to an "al-Qaeda" (base) of millions of believers who await the day of "rapture" when Jesus will come back to Earth and kill everyone in sight - except them. Bush's trademark hostility toward the factual world just mirrors the cognitive dissonance of the crusading God-fearing armies: no wonder the Bush administration lives in fantasyland. [...]

Osama bin Laden's spectacular irruption as the third party in the election might have benefited Bush by reinforcing the atmosphere of fear; but voters seem to be more annoyed by the fact bin Laden is still very much alive and kicking. The fact that Bush outsourced the Afghan war and took the eye off the ball to switch to Iraq (How Bush blew it in Tora Bora, Asia Times Online, October 27) is a story that won't go away - although corporate media largely ignore it: Mike Kasper of the website topdog04.com has an excellent Tora Bora-Iraq planning timeline. And Asia Times Online readers are also alerting that unlike the Bush administration spin, bin Laden did not threaten new attacks against the US: a correct, full transcript of his speech can be found at the al-Jazeera website. [...]

This is an election to bury the neo-cons. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke put it succinctly in America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2004), "Neo-conservatives see themselves in a world of Hobbesian state-of-nature primitivism and conspiracy where perpetual militarized competition for ascendancy is the norm, and moderation (even of the sort envisioned by Hobbes) by the community of nations is impossible, where the search for a social contract a la Locke or Rousseau is illusory, where trust among human beings is elusive, and where adversaries (defined as anyone who does not share the neo-conservative world view) must be preemptively crushed before they crush you."

It took only eight neo-cons to take over the whole US government (namely the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the Department of Defense; the under secretary of defense for policy; the deputy secretary of defense; the secretary of defense; the under secretary of state for arms control; the chairman of the Defense Policy Board; the vice president; the chief of ataff to the vice president; and the deputy national security adviser). They are all members of the ultra-right-wing Project for a New American Century and they all signed the 1996 document "A Clean Break" written for the Likud Party in Israel - both of which have been calling for a war against Iraq since the mid-1990s.

This is an election to bury the real acting president, Dick Cheney, the ultimate architect of an ultra-secretive, anti-democratic, crony-capitalist-fueled Bush administration. But the fact is the neo-con-spun, non-reality-based paradigm really worked.

The numbers speak for themselves. In the faith-based universe versus the "reality community", 55% of Bush supporters still believe Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda; 72% believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or a program to develop them; 69% believe Bush supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; 61% believe that if Bush knew there were no WMD he would not have gone to war; 60% believe most experts believe Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda; 58% believe that the recent Duelfer report concluded that Iraq had either WMD or a major program to develop them; 57% believe that the majority of people in the world would prefer a second Bush term; 55% believe the 9-11 Commission Report concluded Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda; 51% believe Bush supports the Kyoto treaty; and 20% still believe Iraq was directly involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The 'war on terror'/Iraq record

A recent joint report by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the al-Mustansariya University in Baghdad concluded that 100,000 or more Iraqis may have died because of the war, and "most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children".

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice should have resigned or been fired for allowing Bush to start a preemptive war based on false information and extremely incompetent analysis. Rumsfeld should have resigned or been fired over, among other things, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the human-rights abuses in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, for waging two wars on the cheap, for backing the convicted fraud and Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, and for failing to preview the Iraqi liberation struggle/guerrilla movement.

"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US", read the Central Intelligence Agency briefing of August 6, 2001; Bush's reaction was to take a month-long vacation. As bin Laden mocked him in his recent speech, Bush kept reading My Pet Goat while planes-turned-to-missiles were devastating the World Trade Center. He opposed the 9-11 Commission and in the end only talked to its members under Cheney's wing. Radio-controlled by the neo-cons, he implemented their Hobbesian militaristic agenda, alienated key US allies around the world and mocked the United Nations as "irrelevant". There were no WMD in Iraq. But there are plenty in Pakistan and North Korea.

There is no rational explanation why revenge for September 11 got diverted into the catastrophic occupation of Iraq: Hamburg, Germany (where much of the September 11 plot may have been organized), and Hollywood, Florida (where several of the hijackers, according to the US government, had lived), had much more to do with September 11 than Iraq. And there's no rational explanation for why Afghanistan, apart from Kabul, remains a de facto disaster area run by warlords while the Taliban and al-Qaeda are alive and kicking along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Bush was not elected by the majority in 2000. If he is really elected now - with or without the majority of the popular vote - this will send a strong signal to the whole world that Americans support the neo-con agenda. The sequence is predictable: more corporate tax cuts, an even more repressive Patriot Act, more wars in the Middle East, more geopolitical chaos. The stakes couldn't be higher. The crusading armies may legitimize "exporting death and violence to the four corners of the Earth". Or progressive America may rejoin reality and punish the Bush administration for what it is: an illegitimate aberration.

The well-timed release of the fake Osama video has nothing to do with the election campaigns of John Kerry or George Bush per se, as the corporate media tells us. Rather, it is an infomercial for the so-called war on terrorism, released precisely at a time when people are paying attention and, as well, to knock other issues out of the political arena. For the neocon and neolib factions of the ruling elite, there is but one issue: total war against the third world in the service of predatory globalism.

Of course, both so-called candidates, hand-picked by the ruling elite, made the war on terrorism central to their campaigns. Both are saying exactly the same thing—the occupation of Iraq will continue and preemptive wars will commence against Iran and Syria after the election. In essence, we are offered a war against terrorism with sugar or aspartame, the flavor remains the same. Do we want the Straussian neocon warmongers or the Democrat alternative, as exemplified by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (who is aligned with far right Republicans such as Newt Gingrich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ed Meese, Jack Kemp, and other warmongers on the so-called “non-partisan” Committee on the Present Danger, a front organization for the neocon American Enterprise Institute)? Kerry’s National Security Advisor (or more formerly known as Kerry’s National Security and Homeland Security Issue Coordinator) is Rand Beers, a National Security Council bureaucrat who was Bush’s Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism. Democrats, such as Michael Moore, who believe Kerry can be persuaded to champion progressive issues (and also end the occupation of Iraq) may want to take a look at the people Kerry is looking at to staff his administration.

Osama the intel op—or rather the fake Osama, since the real Osama is more than likely dead—made his appearance (as did “Azzam the American” a few days before) after a nearly two year hiatus to remind Americans that the issue is total war, not the economy or prescription drugs for seniors, or a fair and equitable tax law, etc. If Osama was who our leaders say he is—a militant and fundamentalist Muslim—he would not be pulling for either candidate because he would realize that no matter who is president of the United States under the current arrangement foreign policy will remain the same. For as John Stockwell, a former CIA official, writes, “the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World.” John Kerry understands this very well. If he didn’t he would not be allowed to run for president. Michael Moore and the desperate Democrats, who believe Kerry will have a change of heart upon entering the White House, need to do their homework.

VANCOUVER - Some Democrats in Seattle say they are so disenchanted with President George W. Bush that they're ready to leave the U.S.

Jonathan Lynch, who is originally from Pennsylvania, is in Seattle for work – and is now considering applying to move to Canada.

"Perhaps some sort of political asylum or something. I'm not sure how many people are actually seriously considering it but it's come up in many, many discussions," he says.

One young person from the U.S. has already made that leap. Lyle McMahon, who is from Oregon, is studying at UBC.

"Part of the reason I've come here is that I personally haven't felt that comfortable staying within the country," he says.

"A lot of the issues that have arisen through Bush's policies from the Patriot Act or his stance on the environment or women's issues – things of that nature," he says.

"I've felt they've been tokenized and caused a real social detriment to the society."

So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.

Renouncing your citizenship

Given how much the United States as a nation professes to value freedom, your freedom to opt out of the nation itself is surprisingly limited. The State Department does not record the annual number of Americans renouncing their citizenship-"renunciants," as they are officially termed-but the Internal Revenue Service publishes their names on a quarterly basis in the Federal Register. The IRS's interest in the subject is, of course, purely financial; since 1996, the agency has tracked ex-Americans in the hopes of recouping tax revenue, which in some cases may be owed for up to ten years after a person leaves the country. In any event, the number of renunciants is small. In 2002, for example, the Register recorded only 403 departures, of which many (if not most) were merely longtime resident aliens returning home.

The most serious barrier to renouncing your citizenship is that the State Department, which oversees expatriation, is reluctant to allow citizens to go "stateless." Before allowing expatriation, the department will want you to have obtained citizenship or legal asylum in another country-usually a complicated and expensive process, if it can be done at all. Would-be renunciants must also prove that they do not intend to live in the United States afterward. Furthermore, you cannot renounce inside U.S. borders; the declaration must be made at a consul's office abroad.

Those who imagine that exile will be easily won would do well to consider the travails of Kenneth Nichols O'Keefe. An ex-Marine who was discharged, according to his website, under "other than honorable conditions," O'Keefe has tried officially to renounce his citizenship twice without success, first in Vancouver and then in the Netherlands. His initial bid was rejected after the State Department concluded that he would return to the United States-a credible inference, as O'Keefe in fact had returned immediately. After his second attempt,

O'Keefe waited seven months with no response before he tried a more sensational approach. He went back to the consulate at The Hague, retrieved his passport, walked outside, and lit it on fire. Seventeen days later, he received a letter from the State Department informing him that he was still an American, because he had not obtained the right to reside elsewhere. He had succeeded only in breaking the law, since mutilating a passport is illegal. It says so right on the passport.

Heading to Canada or Mexico

In your search for alternate citizenship, you might naturally think first of Canada and Mexico. But despite the generous terms of NAFTA, our neighbors to the north and south are, like us, far more interested in the flow of money than of persons. Canada, in particular, is no longer a paradise awaiting American dissidents: whereas in 1970 roughly 20,000 Americans became permanent residents of Canada, that number has dropped over the last decade to an average of just about 5,000. Today it takes an average of twenty-five months to be accepted as a permanent resident, and this is only the first step in what is likely to be a five-year process of becoming a citizen. At that point the gesture of expatriation may already be moot, particularly if a sympathetic political party has since resumed power.

Mexico's citizenship program is equally complicated. Seniors should know that the country does offer a lenient program for retirees, who may essentially stay as long as they want. But you will not be able to work or to vote, and, more important, you must remain an American for at least five years.

France

Should one candidate win, those who opposed the Iraq war might hope to find refuge in France, where a very select few are allowed to "assimilate" each year. Assimilation is reserved for persons of non-French descent who are able to prove that they are more French than American, having mastered the language as well as the philosophy of the French way of life. Each case is determined on its own merit, and decisions are made by the Ministère de l'Emploi, du Travail, et de la Cohésion Social. When your name is published in the Journal Officiel de la République Français, you are officially a citizen, and may thereafter heckle the United States with authentic Gallic zeal.

The coalition of the willing

Should the other candidate win, war supporters might naturally look to join the coalition of the willing. But you may find a willing and developing nation as difficult to join as an unwilling and developed one. It takes at least five years to become a citizen of Pakistan, for instance, unless one marries into a family, and each applicant for residency in Pakistan is judged on a case-by-case basis. Uzbekistan imposes a five-year wait as well, with an additional twist: the nation does not recognize dual citizenship, and so you will be required to renounce your U.S. citizenship first. Given Uzbekistan's standard of living (low), unemployment (high), and human-rights record (poor), this would be something of a leap of faith.

The Caribbean

A more pleasant solution might be found in the Caribbean. Take, for example, the twin-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which Frommer's guide praises for its "average year-round temperature of 79°F (26°C), low humidity, white-sand beaches, and unspoiled natural beauty." Citizenship in this paradise can be purchased outright. Prices start at around $125,000, which includes a $25,000 application fee and a minimum purchase of $100,000 in bonds. Processing time, which includes checks for criminal records and HIV, can take up to three months, but with luck you could be renouncing by Inauguration Day. The island of Dominica likewise offers a program of "economic citizenship," though it should be noted that Frommer's describes the beaches as "not worth the effort to get there."

Speed is of the essence, however, because your choice of tropical paradises is fast dwindling: similar passport-vending programs in Belize and Grenada have been shut down since 2001 under pressure from the State Department, which does not approve. In any case, it should be noted that under the aforementioned IRS rules, you might well be forced to continue subsidizing needless invasions-or, to be evenhanded, needless afterschool programs.

Indian reservations

Our Native American reservations, which enjoy freedom from state taxation and law enforcement, might seem an ideal home for the political exile. But becoming a citizen of a reservation is difficult-one must prove that one is a descendant of a member of the original tribal base roll-and moreover would be, as a gesture of political disaffection, largely symbolic. Reservations remain subject to federal law; furthermore, citizens of a reservation hold dual citizenships, and as such are expected to vote in U.S. elections and to live with the results.

The high seas

You might consider moving yourself offshore. At a price of $1.3 million you can purchase an apartment on The World, a residential cruise ship that moves continuously, stopping at ports from Venice to Zanzibar to Palm Beach. Again, however, your expatriation would be only partial: The World flies the flag of the Bahamas, but its homeowners, who hail from all over Europe, Asia, and the United States, retain citizenship in their home nations.

To obtain a similar result more cheaply, you can simply register your own boat under a flag of convenience and float it outside the United States' 230-mile zone of economic control. There, on your Liberian tanker, you will essentially be an extension of that African nation, subject only to its laws, and may imagine yourself free of oppressive government.

Micronations

The boldest approach is to start a nation of your own. Sadly, these days it is essentially impossible to buy an uninhabited island and declare it a sovereign nation: virtually every rock above the waterline is now under the jurisdiction of one principality or another. But efforts have been made to build nations on man-made structures or on reefs lying just below the waterline. Among the more successful of these is the famous Principality of Sealand, which was founded in 1967 on an abandoned military platform off the coast of Britain. The following year a British judge ruled that the principality lay outside the nation's territorial waters. New citizenships in Sealand, however, are not being granted or sold at present.

A less fortunate attempt was made in 1972, when Michael Oliver, a Nevada businessman, built an island on a reef 260 miles southwest of Tonga. Hiring a dredger, he piled up sand and mud until he had enough landmass to declare independence for his "Republic of Minerva." Unfortunately, the Republic of Minerva was soon invaded by a Tongan force, whose number is said to have included a work detail of prisoners, a brass band, and Tonga's 350-pound king himself. The reef was later officially annexed by the kingdom.

More recently, John J. Prisco III, of the Philippines, has declared himself the prince of the Principality of New Pacific, and announced that he has discovered a suitable atoll in the international waters of the Central Pacific. As of publication, the principality has yet to begin the first phase of construction, but it is already accepting applications for citizenship.

Imaginary nations

Perhaps the most elegant solution is to join a country that exists only in one's own-or someone else's-imagination. Many such virtual nations can be found on the Internet, and citizenships in them are easy to acquire. This, in fact, was the route most recently attempted by Kenneth Nichols O'Keefe, the unfortunate ex-Marine. In February 2003, O'Keefe went to Baghdad to serve as a human shield, traveling with a passport issued to him by the "World Service Authority," an outfit based in Washington, D.C., that has dubbed more than 1.2 million people "world citizens." While laying over in Turkey, however, he was detained; Turkey, as it turns out, does not recognize the World Service Authority. O'Keefe was forced to apply for a replacement U.S. passport from the State Department, which rather graciously complied.

Upon his arrival in Baghdad, O'Keefe promptly set the replacement passport on fire. But he remains, to his dismay, an American.

US forces have stepped up pressure on Iraqi fighters in Falluja, using AC-130 aircraft and tanks to bombard eastern and northwestern areas of the town.

Witnesses said AC-130s - cargo aircraft equipped with cannon and machine guns - were in action for at least half an hour late on Wednesday while tanks shelled the town on the ground.

The bombardment was said to be the heaviest on the town for several weeks.

The US military is poised for an offensive on Falluja, some 50km west of Baghdad, to flush out armed men resisting its forces.

High spirits

Speaking to Aljazeera from Falluja, Iraqi journalist Abu Bakr al-Dulaimi said the city's citizens feel that US communiques about an imminent large-scale attack against their city and Ramadi is an attempt to destroy their morale.

"However, the possible attack on Falluja does not affect their high spirits," he added.

"Falluja citizens have showed indifference towards Bush's re-election as they believe the US policies are clear and consistent when dealing with Islam, Muslims and the Iraq case," al-Dulaimi pointed out.

Earlier in the day, attacks by US warplanes sent up plumes of black smoke from the eastern edge of Falluja.

A woman was seriously wounded and a teenage girl lost her right leg in the strikes, hospital official Isam Muhammad said.

The US-backed Iraqi interim government has threatened to wrest control of Falluja from the Iraqi fighters before elections scheduled for January.

Residents of the city say the daily bombardments cause heavy civilian casualties and increase resentment against the United States.

George Bush, the man whose prime campaign plank has been his ability to wage war on terror, could have had Osama bin Laden's head handed to him on a platter on his very first day in office, and the offer held good until February 2 of 2002. This is the charge leveled by an Afghan American who had been retained by the US government as an intermediary between the Taliban and both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Kabir Mohabbat is a 48-year businessman in Houston, Texas. Born in Paktia province in southern Afghanistan, he's from the Jaji clan (from which also came Afghanistan's last king). [...]

In a lengthy interview and in a memorandum Kabir Mohabbat has given us a detailed account and documentation to buttress his charge that the Bush administration could have had Osama bin Laden and his senior staff either delivered to the US or to allies as prisoners, or killed at their Afghan base. As a search of the data base shows, portions of Mohabbat's role have been the subject of a number of news reports, including a CBS news story by Alan Pizzey aired September 25, 2001. This is the first he has made public the full story.

By the end of 1999 US sanctions and near-world-wide political ostracism were costing the Taliban dearly and they had come to see Osama bin Laden and his training camps as, in Mohabbat's words, "just a damn liability". Mohabbat says the Taliban leadership had also been informed in the clearest possible terms by a US diplomat that if any US citizen was harmed as a consequence of an Al Qaeda action, the US would hold the Taliban responsible and target Mullah Omar and the Taliban leaders.

In the summer of 2000, on one of his regular trips to Afghanistan, Mohabbat had a summit session with the Taliban high command in Kandahar. They asked him to arrange a meeting with appropriate officials in the European Union, to broker a way in which they could hand over Osama bin Laden . Mohabbat recommended they send bin Laden to the World Criminal Court in the Hague.

Shortly thereafter, in August of 2000, Mohabbat set up a meeting at the Sheraton hotel in Frankfurt between a delegation from the Taliban and Reiner Weiland of the EU. The Taliban envoys repeated the offer to deport bin Laden. Weiland told them he would take the proposal to Elmar Brok, foreign relations director for the European Union. According to Mohabbat, Brok then informed the US Ambassador to Germany of the offer.

At this point the US State Department called Mohabbat and said the government wanted to retain his services, even before his official period on the payroll, which lasted from November of 2000 to late September, 2001, by which time he tells us he had been paid $115,000.

On the morning of October 12, 2000, Mohabbat was in Washington DC, preparing for an 11am meeting at the State Department , when he got a call from State, telling him to turn on the tv and then come right over. The USS Cole had just been bombed. Mohabbat had a session with the head of State's South East Asia desk and with officials from the NSC. They told him the US was going to "bomb the hell out of Afghanistan". "Give me three weeks," Mohabbat answered, "and I will deliver Osama to your doorstep." They gave him a month.

Mohabbat went to Kandahar and communicated the news of imminent bombing to the Taliban. They asked him to set up a meeting with US officials to arrange the circumstances of their handover of Osama. On November 2, 2000, less than a week before the US election, Mohabbat arranged a face-to-face meeting, in that same Sheraton hotel in Frankfurt, between Taliban leaders and a US government team.

After a rocky start on the first day of the Frankfurt session, Mohabbat says the Taliban realized the gravity of US threats and outlined various ways bin Laden could be dealt with. He could be turned over to the EU, killed by the Taliban, or made available as a target for Cruise missiles. In the end, Mohabbat says, the Taliban promised the "unconditional surrender of bin Laden" . "We all agreed," Mohabbat tells CounterPunch, "the best way was to gather Osama and all his lieutenants in one location and the US would send one or two Cruise missiles."

London — Britain's most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, condemned the U.S. led invasion of Iraq as a “war crime” and said Tuesday it was based on lies.

The physicist spoke at an anti-war demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square timed to coincide with the U.S. election. Protesters read out the names of thousands of Iraqis and coalition troops killed since the March 2003 invasion.

“The war was based on two lies,” said Hawking. “The first was we were in danger of weapons of mass destruction and the second was that Iraq was somehow to blame for Sept. 11.

“It has been a tragedy for all the families that have lost members. As many as 100,000 people have died, half of them women and children. If that is not a war crime, what is?”

Hawking, the best-selling author of A Brief History Of Time, was joined by other public figures. Similar events were being held in Spain, Italy, Australia, the United States and Iraq.

“Our message to the U.S. is that the war is illegal and unnecessary, and we want our troops to come home,” said Andrew Burgin, a spokesman for demonstration organizer Stop the War Coalition. “We also want to highlight the enormous number of Iraqis killed in this conflict who are so often ignored.”

In Trafalgar Square, hundreds of spectators holding candles or placards opposing President Bush listened as speakers read the names of the dead while their images were projected onto a large screen.

One group of students from London's Imperial College waved anti-Bush signs, hoping to send a message to U.S. voters.

“If enough people show up tonight at the demonstration, I think a few more voters might notice what we're saying,” said Emma Thomson, a student from Scotland who said she was able to cast a vote in Pennsylvania because she was born there.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday ordered several thousand U.S. troops to extend their tour of duty in Iraq for two months.

The 6,500 troops had been due to come home before Iraqi elections scheduled for January.

American military officials say the order is to increase troop numbers and capabilities ahead of the elections, which militants have vowed to disrupt.

The news comes as U.S.-led forces prepare for a possible offensive to retake the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Falluja, which American warplanes pounded overnight.

Also Tuesday, a car bomb exploded near the Iraqi Education Ministry in Baghdad, killing at least five people.

The explosion, which happened about 9:30 a.m. local time, badly damaged the ministry building, along with about six cars parked nearby.

Iraqi security officials say they believe it was caused by a car bomb, set off on a side street bordering the ministry and a busy commercial district. Police say a large wall contained the blast, limiting its potential damage.

Witnesses say the body of one victim, an elderly man, burned in the street. Reports say two of the victims were women.

Government building and Iraqi officials have been frequent targets of militants intent on disrupting reconstruction and civil order.

WASHINGTON - Explosives used in some of Iraq's major terror bombings were the same type as those missing from a dump monitored by the UN, the Daily News has learned.

Forensic tests by a joint task force at the Quantico, Va., Marine base show the bombers who leveled the United Nations and Jordanian missions in Iraq, and who staged other big attacks, used RDX and HMX military-grade high explosives, said a government source briefed on the findings. Both types of munitions were under seal at the Al Qaqaa site near Baghdad.

"[Analysts] are able to say there are chemical composites that match the same type of explosives" sealed by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors before the war began, said the informed source.

But the lab experts - from the FBI, CIA and Defense Department - are "just not able to say conclusively" that the chemical residue at the bombing sites matches the Al Qaqaa stockpiles, the source added. Analysts don't have samples from Al Qaqaa to compare with the bombings.

"It's not outside the realm of possibility that the [Al Qaqaa] stuff was used by insurgents, but ... it's hard to say the powder is from there," said the government source.

Democrat John Kerry chided President Bush in a TV ad for not securing the explosives, suggesting that they were "the kind used for attacks in Iraq and for terrorist bombings."

BUDAPEST - Hungary will withdraw 300 non-combat troops from Iraq by March 31, despite a request from the Iraqi interim government to stay for another year.

"We are obliged to stay there until the (Iraqi) elections. To stay longer is an impossibility," Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said.
The Iraqi elections are due to be held by Jan. 31.

The Hungarian government has been under pressure from its citizens and its opposition parties to bring the troops home.

The Iraqi interim government sent a letter to Hungary about three weeks asking that the troops' mission be extended by about a year "to help Iraq's stabilization process."

Hungary has a transportation contingent of 300 troops in Hillah, south of Baghdad. One Hungarian soldier has died in Iraq.

Gyurcsany, who has been prime minister since September, said he did not believe in pre-emptive war.

Fighters have mounted the biggest attacks yet on Iraq's oil infrastructure, blowing up three pipelines in the north and hitting exports via Turkey, oil officials say. The attacks on Tuesday, which were hours apart, sharply reduced crude oil supplies to Iraq's biggest refinery at Baiji.

The government is already struggling to build up stocks of refined oil products before winter.

The attacks did not lift oil prices, however, as speculation about a US election victory for Senator John Kerry triggered a 10% decline from last Monday's price peaks. US crude by 1200 GMT was off nine cents at $50.04 a barrel.

Attacks against oil facilities in north and central Iraq have intensified in the past few weeks as US forces attacked cities in central Iraq. Imports of refined products have been also disrupted.

The first pipeline attack on Monday night destroyed a section of the Iraq-Turkey export pipeline in the Riyadh area, 65 km southwest