Greg Palast – Memphis Flyer

In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not make on American TV about the deadly self-censorship that had seized U.S. newsrooms. After September 11th, news on the U.S. tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

“It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions,” the aging journalist told the British television audience.

“It’s an obscene comparison,” he said, “but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented.” No U.S. reporter who values his neck or career will “bore in on the tough questions.”

Back in the U.S., Rather smothered his conscience and told his TV audience: “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up; just tell me where.”

During the war in Vietnam, Rather’s predecessor at CBS, Walter Cronkite, asked some pretty hard questions about Nixon’s handling of the war. Today, our sons and daughters are dying in Iraq. But, unlike Cronkite, Rather could not, would not, question Bush. On the British broadcast, you could see Rather was deeply unhappy with himself for playing the game.

“What is going on,” he said, “is a belief that the public doesn’t need to know — limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war. It’s extremely dangerous and should not be accepted, and I’m sorry to say that up to and including this moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that.”

Rather’s words had a poignant personal ring for me. He was speaking on Newsnight, BBC’s nightly current-affairs program, which broadcasts my own reports. As an American, I do not report for BBC by choice. The truth is, if I want to put a hard, investigative report about the U.S. on the nightly news, I have to broadcast it in exile from London.

Rather is in hot water for a report my own investigative team put in Britain’s Guardian papers and on the BBC years ago. In 1999, I wrote that former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes had put in the fix for George Bush to get out of ‘Nam and into the Guard.

What is hot news this month in the U.S. is a five-year-old story to the rest of the world. And you still wouldn’t have seen it, except that Rather and a 60 Minutes producer finally got fed up and stepped out of line. As Rather predicted, he stuck out his neck and got his head chopped off.

Is Rather’s report accurate? Is George W. Bush a war hero or a privileged little shirker-in-chief? What I haven’t read is about two crucial documents supporting the BBC/CBS story. The first is Barnes’ signed and sworn affidavit to a Texas court in 1999, in which he testifies to the Air Guard fix, which then-Governor George W. Bush, given the opportunity, declined to challenge.

And there is a second document, from the files of the U.S. Justice Department, again confirming the story of the fix to keep Bush’s white bottom out of Vietnam. That document, shown last year in the BBC television documentary Bush Family Fortunes, correctly identifies Barnes as the bag man even before his 1999 confession.

This is not a story about Rather. The millionaire celebrity can defend himself without my help. This is really a story about the fear that stops other reporters in the U.S. from following the evidence about this administration where it leads — American news guys and gals who will practice their smiles, adjust their hairspray, bleach their teeth, look at the treatment of Rather, and say, “Not me, babe.” •

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. About one million of them — half of the rejected ballots — were cast by African Americans, although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden in the appendices to reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last election.

How do you spoil two million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in Florida — and the highest spoilage rate. One in eight votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in “Al Gore.” Optical reading machines rejected these because “Al” is a “stray mark.”

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee’s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let’s not get smug about Florida’s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, “It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. — about one million votes — were cast by nonwhite voters.”

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Governor Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote-count procedures.

Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Illinois, has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let’s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated that Florida’s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, these blacks were too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After the disaster in Gadsden, public outcry forced the government to change that county’s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 midterm election. Ballot design, machines, and procedure, says Klinkner, control spoilage.

So it’s clear, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named “Help America Vote Act,” signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corporation’s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And the history of computer-voting glitches also has a decidedly racial bias. Florida’s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won’t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts. In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing one million black voters’ ballots. n

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, from which this article is taken.