On Tuesday, the Supreme Court finally busted the Arizona election law that was supposed to keep "alien" (i.e. Democratic) voters off the voter rolls.  Two years ago, we flew to Arizona to bust this bogus game.  Here's the original report  ...

Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
GOP Game to Swipe the November Election

* * * * * *

For fourteen years, investigative reporter Greg Palast has exposed racial bias in US voting for BBC Television, for The Guardian and, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone magazine.

Donate a minimum of $50 to support our renewed investigation of elections theft. As thanks, our foundation will send you a signed copy of Palast’s bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

…And during this Voting Rights Month, we’ll include the full-color tarot-sized card deck, Jokers’ Wild, which includes the lovely Katherine Harris, the Koch Brothers and more.

Your donation is tax-deductible -- and boy, do we need it! So many evils, so little time—and so few resources. And thank you for keeping us alive for a decade of investigative scoops.

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About the time Barack Obama ordered the drone strike that killed Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American kid Facebooked his second-rate choice of hip-hop favorites. I say "second-rate," because Abdul was my son's age almost exactly, so I know the kind of crap they listen to.

Every Tuesday, President Obama personally checks off the names of people he wants killed.  George Bush, a bit more squeamish than Obama, never did that; but Mr. Obama felt those decisions were the president's responsibility: he want[s] to keep his own finger on the trigger," according to one report.  A tidy, scheduled man, the President only picks his victims once a week, now called "Terror Tuesday
On October 14, 2011, in Shabwah province, Yemen, Abdul, went out with his cousins and friends for a good old US-style barbecue, when Obama's drone fired a rocket, blowing the teenager to pieces.  Or I should say "piece."  All that was left of Abdul was a piece of skull with long curly hair that allowed his relatives to identify this hunk of his head by his US-type haircut.

Obama didn't order the killings (Abdul's friends and cousins died too) as a random act of crazy.  No-Drama Obama doesn't believe in random. Abdul's problem was that his father was Anwar al-Awlaki.  Obama killed Abdul's dad as well.  Daddy al-Awlaki, an American imam who voted for George Bush, had gone over to the side of the bad guys, and after leaving the USA, broadcast pro-terrorism radio reports from Arabia.

We can argue until the cows come home about whether Daddy al-Awlaki was a legitimate kill target.  It is, after all,  right there in the US Constitution that the penalty for treason is death.  I suppose that, before executing him, a jury trial would have been nice. But nice was not going to happen.  So, OK, Barack, we'll let that one go.

But what about the 16-year-old?  Obama didn't even pretend that the kid was a terrorist, or terrorist in-the-making, nor adopting in any way his father's crazed kill-Americans crusade.

What could justify execution of Abdul?  When asked, then-White House press spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father"

I guess he should have.

Obama's minions tried to cover up the hit on the teenagers.  Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress of the killings by writing that U.S. drones had blown up Anwar al-Awlaki, the crazy cleric and three other Americans who "were not specifically targeted."

Holder's comment makes it seem that Awlaki's son was blown up with him—a sad case of ‘collateral damage.'

But are you ready for this?  The teenager—along with his cousin and friends—was killed two weeks after and hundreds of miles away from the site where rockets killed his father.

Obama's Seal Team Sick

I was straightened out on the facts by Richard Rowley, America's most courageous investigative reporter.  Rowley filmed, directed and edited the brilliant, horrific, and brilliantly horrific documentary Dirty Wars, previewing this week in the US.

The film centers on Rowley's reporting partner, the indefatigable Jeremy Scahill, whom Rowley follows from the scene of a massacre at a wedding party in Afghanistan to an interview with a warlord in Mogadishu (while under sniper fire).

You might know Rowley as Ricardo, the pathologically calm cameraman portrayed in my book Vultures' Picnic. In Iraq, Rowley covered the US Army assault on Fallujah "embedded" with the assaulted, the insurgents.  That was insane.  Insane but brilliant. (Our producer at BBC warned Ricardo that he was one lucky cat, but he'd already used up seven of his nine lives.)

In Dirty Wars, Rowley and Scahill reveal that drones are just one toy in our Presidents' murderous toy-chest.  And the kill list is far larger than even a smart dude like Obama can tick off on a Tuesday.  Scahill calculates that the targeted kills in Afghanistan and Pakistan now total more than 17,000!

Drones can't kill them all.  In 2009, a US cruise missile hit al Majala, a remote village of Bedouins in Yemen, killing a dozen herdsmen and three babies.  Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh took responsibility, proudly, for killing supposed "terrorists."

However, a courageous Yemeni reporter, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, visited the site, photographed the remains of the US missile—and was promptly jailed.

The US is particularly shy about taking credit for the cruise missile kills as it boosted al Qaeda's recruitment drive in Yemen.

Rowley and Scahill are the only US reporters to have gone to the Bedouin village and filmed the missile casing—cold evidence confirming the US had entered a war without any legal declaration—-indeed, in complete secrecy.

Scahill also revealed that, while Yemen's President Saleh was nervous about keeping the reporter imprisoned, Saleh withdrew his pardon at the personal request of Barack Obama.  Obama wanted the journalist not just silenced, but punished.

Wiki-Leaks:  Cleaning up Dirty Wars

I was curious:  Did Scahill and Rowley make use of Wiki-Leaks?

"Wiki-Leaks was absolutely indispensible," Rowley told me, a treasure trove of State Department confessions confirming what they found on the ground.  It was through Wiki-Leaks that they discovered that President Saleh joked with US operatives about lying to his Congress about the US missile attack on al Majala.

And it was in Wiki-Leaks that Scahill found the warlord Indha Adde—a.k.a. "White Eyes" was on the USA's payroll.     I should say, General White Eyes–a rank he gave himself in the Somali Army by pinning three stars on his jacket.  Where did the US military find this cutthroat? Previously, the Wiki-Leaks cables revealed, the US knew he was the protector of the al Qaeda bombers that blew up the US Embassy in Nairobi.

Rowley captures the warlord/general on camera saying, "The USA is the master in war"—quite a compliment from a natural born killer like White Eyes.

And General "Eyes" is quite right.  The Drone Ranger's secret war has now spread to 75 nations.  It's all under the command of General William H. McRaven.

The US press is in love with McRaven, lauded as the man who planned the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.  But there's not one single US network or paper that would report on Scahill's discovery that McRaven was also the guy who planned the night raid on the Afghan wedding party that killed the bride, the groom and the groom's mother.

Maybe that was some horrible mistake.  But McRaven's crew, called "The American Taliban" by Afghans, made sure that no one would finger the US:  Rowley and Scahill obtained a secretly recorded video of McRaven's commandoes slicing the bullets out of the bride's and groom's bodies to prevent their killers' identification.

McRaven's semi-private army, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is warring in our name worldwide in nations he won't name and Obama will arrest you for naming.  Not even Orwell could have dreamed up that one.

I asked about the value of Wiki-Leaks to Rowley and Scahill because of the ongoing trial of Pvt. Bradley Manning and the impending capture of Edward Snowden, the contractor willing to blow away his career and freedom to let you know that nice Mr. Obama has been spying on you.

A rabbi from Nazareth once said, "The truth shall make you free." And that's exactly what Obama is afraid of:  faced with the truths revealed in Dirty Wars, they know most Americans would cut themselves free of McRaven's Seal Team Sick.

I am convinced the hit on al-Awlaki's son was meant to teach a lesson, If you want to be a martyr, we'll make your son and your mom and daughter martyrs too. 

Such terror-for-terror can be, I'll admit, quite effective.  During the Ronald Reagan years, that gutless faux-cowboy President sent weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini in return for the release of hostages taken by Hezbollah.  The Russians got their hostages home another way.  The USSR didn't accept an arms-for-hostage deal. Rather, the KGB systematically assassinated the hostage-takers' cousins, mothers and brothers one by one—until Hezbollah released all the Russian hostages.

By rocketing the children of those we fear, we are indeed teaching them a lesson.  But what are they learning?

Next year, Malia Obama turns 16.  I hope we never hear that harm has come to Malia while some chuckling spokesman for al Qaeda says, "She should have had a far more responsible father."

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast’s films with Richard “Ricardo” Rowley for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are available on the DVD, Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon – On the Trail of Financial Marauders. This week, you can download it here without charge from the Palast Investigative Fund or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

Locate screenings of Dirty Wars near you.

Read Ricardo’s story in Palast's highly acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic.

Greg Palast is also author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

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This month –as early as tomorrow— the US Supreme Court will tell us whether Black and Brown citizens have the right to vote.

Now, if you saw the film Lincoln, you probably thought that issue was settled about 143 years ago. But Honest Abe never imagined a High Court occupied by Dishonest Thomas and Scalia the Scurrilous.

There’s been a lot of nonsense talk fogging the issue before the Court. To cut through the BS, the Palast Investigative Fund has made a little film, How Do You Steal a Dream?

You could call it 'The Idiot’s Guide to the Voting Rights Act.' The idiots, of course, are on the Bench.

We made How Do You Steal a Dream? in coordination with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by Martin Luther King.

Give me 14 minutes—watch this film--and I’ll give you something you can do to stop the return of Jim Crow.

What’s at stake is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Without Section 5, the Voting Rights Act’s teeth fall out, and the Justice Department loses any real ability to stop Jim Crow tactics used to keep voters of color (mostly Democratic Blue) from registering and casting ballots.

Section 5 requires that 16 states with histories of Jim Crow voting restrictions “pre-clear” any changes in voting procedure with the Department of Justice.

But the right-wing Supremes say that Florida and other states subject to Section 5 no longer play games with voting rights.

Really? If you think that African-American voters are no longer vulnerable to registration purges, hours-long lines to vote in Black precincts, ID challenges and other impediments, I have two words for you: Katherine Harris.

And if you thought “Purge’n General” Harris was bad news for minority voters, her Jane Crow act was nothing compared to Governor Rick Scott’s current push to purge 180,000 “illegal alien” voters from Florida voter rolls.

Those 180,000 American citizens were only allowed to vote in last November's election because Section 5 was still alive.

Pop quiz: How many “illegal alien” voters did Governor Rick ultimately bust? Go ahead, make a guess. You’re wrong!

Get the answer in How Do You Steal a Dream?

And don’t be an idiot: pass this on. This is a Civil Rights Movement… so let’s get moving.

****

For fourteen years, investigative reporter Greg Palast has exposed racial bias in US voting for BBC Television, for The Guardian and, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone magazine.

Donate a minimum of $50 to support our renewed investigation of elections theft. As thanks, our foundation will send you a signed copy of Palast’s bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. (Many stories from this book originally appeared at TheMudflats.net)

…And during this Voting Rights Month, we’ll include the full-color tarot-sized card deck, Jokers’ Wild, including the lovely Katherine Harris above, the Koch Brothers and more.

Your donation is tax-deductible -- and boy, do we need it! So many evils, so little time—and so few resources. And thank you for keeping us alive for a decade of investigative scoops.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
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www.GregPalast.com

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For Care2.com
By Greg Palast, author, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits

Jim Crow is alive and well — and he has mounted a new attack on the law Martin Luther King dreamed of: the Voting Rights Act.

This month, as early as Wednesday, the Supreme Court will decide on the suit brought by Shelby County, Alabama, which challenges the right of the Department of Justice to review changes in voting procedure.

Sixteen states are subject to this “pre-clearance” law, every one with a history of Jim Crow rules such as “literacy” tests — Blacks had to recite the Constitution, Whites “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

But Jim Crow is still alive and well in these states.

Examples: Attempts to cut the number of early voting days, to expunge “illegal alien” voters without any evidence, refusing Spanish-language ballots, have been blocked by the Department of Justice and courts because they have stopped Black and Hispanic citizens casting ballots.

Dixie moans it’s been picked on unfairly, but the “pre-clearance” states, chosen by an arithmetic formula, include all or parts of the “Confederate states” of California, Arizona, Alaska and New York.

All those above the Mason-Dixon line are on the civil-rights hot-water roster because of a history of hostility to Hispanic citizens. In 2006, for example, the Republican Secretary of State of California rejected 42% of voter registration forms because the names were “unusual” and difficult to type into records! The names, like Chávez and Muhammad, were only “unusual” for Republicans.

New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg is happy to pre-clear his city’s changes with the Justice Department and has told that to the Court. But once again, as Dr. King said in his Dream speech, in Alabama, the “Governor has his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification” — to nullify the 15th Amendment’s right to vote and to interpose himself between federal law and the enforcement of this basic American right.

And the Southland? In 2000, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris purged tens of thousands of African-Americans from voter rolls, labeling them “felons” when their only crime was VWB: Voting While Black. All — every one — were innocent. And again, in 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott targeted 180,000 voters, mostly Latinos, as illegal “alien” voters. The Governor, when challenged by the Justice Department, cut the “alien” list to 198 but in the end, could only produce evidence against only one.

That's one illegal voter out of 181,000 – all of whom would have lost their vote without Section 5 of the Voting Rights Acts.

If it were not for Section 5, the pre-clearance law, the purges, gerrymandering and other racially bent trickery rampant in Florida, Arizona (with its profiling and harassment of Hispanic voters) and Alaska with its bias against Native Americans would be so much worse. Without review — and the threat of review — Americans would once again lose the rights that the Constitution promises, won with the blood of our Fathers.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the Jim Crow and José Crow tactics that create long lines of voters of color in Ohio and other states.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan signed massive expansions of the Voting Rights Act, tripling its reach. It is time to extend the law's protections again — to Ohio, to Wisconsin, to everyone.

When every American is protected by the Voting Rights Act review of voting changes, then all of us may be secure that our votes will not be nullified by politicians abusing the voting system to seize office through tactics racist in effect, if not intent.

A half century ago this year, Dr. Martin Luther King shared his dream with America:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’

"We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

King’s dream is the American Dream — which no Court should take away. It is a mighty stream which must touch all citizens in every state.

Without “pre-clearance,” the Voting Rights Act is an empty promise — with purged, blocked and intimidated voters having to protest after an election to the very officials elected by the vote thievery that put them in office.

If this Supreme Court removes “pre-clearance” Section 5 on the grounds that it does not apply to every state, then the solution is simple and just: apply pre-clearance to every state.  Every American deserves a review by Justice of laws which tell us who can vote — and who can’t.

As Dr. King admonished us, we must not be satisfied when we see Black folk, a half century after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, stand in line for six hours to vote, whether in Miami or in Cleveland.

We petition the Court and Congress to let freedom ring.

Sign the petition to Defend Martin Luther King's Dream Act - here.

Joining Palast as initial co-signers of the petition are Dr. Charles Steele, Jr., CEO, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who succeeded Dr. King as President of SCLC; and one of the original Freedom Riders, Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr.,  co-founder, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Watch the film, sign the petition and pass this note on.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast has investigated the suppression of the African-American vote in America for BBC Television, The Nation and, with his co-author, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone. Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, with cartoonist Ted Rall, of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

Support our ongoing investigation of racial voter suppression with a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund and receive a signed copy of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits – for a limited time we are including a free deck of Palast's investigative, Tarot size, Joker's Wild playing cards with the book.

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It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

(We'd both signed on for Kazakhstan's annual Eurasia Media Forum, a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)

Now, it is my policy never to mention an interlocutor's weight, nor question the legitimacy of their birth, given my own vulnerabilities. (A would-be groupie told me, "You could do a few sit-ups, you know." Yes, I know.)

But this particular Fat Bastard is asking for it. I had tried to put the belly of this beast out of my thoughts, but I still had a New York Times story folded in my pocket that begins:

ATHENS – As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with labour pains, but in truth he probably just can't bend over at all.

Pangalos is best known for blaming the working people of Greece for the horror and the hunger among the ruins of what was once Greece's economy. However, it is, of course, not his fault; until last year, and through the core of the crisis, he was just Greece's Deputy Prime Minister – why should he be held accountable for anything?

Minister Pangalos is much loved by Europe's banking chieftains, by vulture speculators and by Prussian President Angela Merkel because they've got themselves a gigantic Greek who will mouth their mantra: that his nation's sudden collapse can be blamed squarely on olive-pit-spitting, lazy-ass Greeks who won't work more than three hours a week, then retire while they're still teenagers to swill state-subsidised ouzo.

Pangalos leads the Fifth Column of Greeks calling to accept Germany's terms of economic surrender: austerity, meaning cuts in food allowances, in pensions, in jobs. As of this week, more than one in four Greeks (27 percent) are out of work.

While we hunted for caffeine, Fat Bastard told me that anyone who complains about the austerity diktat, "Is a fascist or a communist or a conspiracy theorist." He didn't tell me which of these three categories the 11-year-old kids complaining of hunger pains fell into.

Just for the record, those Greeks who can get a job, work 619 more hours per year (see table) than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans as well).

But in the world according to Pangalos, Merkel and poobahs of the media, Greece went to hell in a handbag because the entire nation suddenly turned into work-shirking grifters.

But there's another explanation for wrack and ruin: Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims – scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

In 2001, Greece dropped the drachma for the euro. The drachma was good enough for Aristotle and very good for tourism, Greece's main industry. But when sun-and-fun was re-priced in euros, tourists swam across the Aegean Sea for kofte meatballs priced in dirt-cheap Turkish lira. Pre-euro tourist visits to Greece outnumbered those to Turkey by millions; but by last year, it was the just the opposite, with two-thirds of tourists tanning in Turkey.

With its Treasury bleeding hard currency, the government of Minister Pangalos' PASOK joined together with the opposition in a complex international currency kiting operation to conceal the losses from the public and, most importantly, from the European Central Bank.

Why the cover-up of the deficit? The answer is that the euro is more than a currency: it is a straitjacket, a set of constricting rules that, for example, prohibit any euro nation from running a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP.

That's impossible in a recession – not to mention plain insane – as it requires cutting public spending when spending is needed most. The USA, China, Brazil, India – the nations that pulled the world from depression's brink – all ran deficits way over the nutty 3 percent cap. I asked finance wiz Nomi Prins to calculate America's debt-to-GDP ratio using euro rules, and she estimates that Obama's deficits are now way down from recession's peak – to 10.2 percent of GDP.

Greece, fearing expulsion from the euro loony bin, turned to Goldman Sachs. For a mere $400 million in fees, plus golden sacks of ill-gotten trading gain, the investment bank was willing to cook the nation's books via a complex set of derivatives transactions. [For the particulars of the derivatives con, see How Goldman Sacked Greece.]

Since the con was busted open in 2009, the Greek public has had to pay cheated bondholders a premium to insure against default of the nation's debts. The credit default insurance costs an average of $14,000 (£9,218) per family per year.

When I was a racketeering investigator working with the US Justice Department, in the days when we pretended America still had justice, we would have called the derivatives trick a "fraud on the market". We'd handcuff the perpetrators, lock 'em up, or, at the least, make them cough up their purloined profits.

So, should Goldman pay up? Not according to Pangalos, because – in the worldview of our rulers – the victims of the scam are as guilty as the victimisers. Pangalos even put it into a famous (or infamous) motto: mazi-ta-fagame. That's Greek for "We all ate it together".

But the visible evidence suggests Pangalos, not Pantelis – the kid doubled over with stomach pain – ate all the pies.

The mass privatisation of public property at wiener schnitzel prices has German speculators dipping in their spoons as well, though the Federation of German industry is complaining about Greece's own "princes" gobbling up the assets.

I was going to invite Minister Pangalos to lunch to test his theories, but he left in a pachydermic huff when I asked him about Geir Haarde. Haarde, the former Prime Minister of Iceland, was found guilty of concealing his knowledge of the trickery used by Iceland's banks before they melted that nation's finances.

I asked Fat Bastard, "Do you think you should be in prison for" similar conduct in the Greek government?

Maybe that's why Minister Pangalos didn't want to go to lunch with me.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast’s book Vultures' Picnic (Constable Robinson UK/Penguin USA), including chapters on Greece and Goldman, will be published in Greek in early fall by Livani.  Download the first chapter, Goldfinger, and videos at VulturesPicnic.org.

Greg Palast's other books are the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

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"Now that the sonovabitch is dead, why is the US still angry with us?"

"Us", in this conversation, are the Taliban. The SOB in question is Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban's frustration was relayed to me by Yahya Maroofi, Counsellor to Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai – Karzai's Kissinger, if Kissinger had a soul.

The Silk Road nation of Kazakhstan is an excellent place to encounter the dervishes of the Great Game for control of the camel-and-pipeline routes of the Central Asian steppes. Here we can witness the diplomatic-military idiocies of new empires pathetically attempting to ignore the dried skeletons of the imperial forces that went before them.

Maroofi was spending the day in Kazakhstan's capital on his way to little-noticed peace negotiations – little noticed because neither Uncle Sam nor Great-Uncle Britain were invited. Attendance is limited to those frontline states that will be left holding the grenade when the US and UK pull out the pin with the removal of their troops in 2014. The lineup includes Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan (birthplace of the Boston Bombers) and the big new swinging dick on the block, Turkey, as well as Iran, the nation most feared and despised by the Taliban. The unannounced guests, of course, are the Taliban themselves.

I am moved to recount a bit of my lengthy talk with the Afghan minister after reading reams of meretricious bunkum about Afghanistan from the pens of US propaganda repeaters pretending to be reporters. My favourite is, "Hope Seen for Afghanistan After Coalition Leaves," in the New York Times. To give us an expert view, two American reporters used their 20-column inches to take down the words of General Joseph F Dunford Jr, commander of all "international forces" in Afghanistan.

Dunford just arrived in Afghanistan for the first time about 12 weeks ago. He may not know a Tajik from a camel fart, but he does speak fluent Pashto. (I made that last one up because I'm tired of Europeans making fun of Americans for being ignorant of foreign languages.) Notably, the Times article about the future of Afghanistan includes not one word from an Afghan.

But the General does have lots of medals (see?), so I suppose he's as good a source as any.

I did wonder why the Times flew reporters all the way to Kabul to speak to a bewildered US general when they could have saved time and painful immunisations by just copying the Pentagon press releases in Washington. The Times asked "Fighting Joe", as he's called in his official bio, the only question of concern to the US press: "Will the Afghan troops be able to resume lead responsibility" in killing Taliban? "Yes!" asserted the tourist-general.

So I figured, what the hell, let's ask an Afghan about Afghanistan's future. Maroofi, the minister into whose hands this future falls, takes a different tack entirely. He has no time for the American fixation on whether Afghans will fight the Taliban. He makes it clear that Afghans don't want to fight the Taliban at all. And the Taliban don't want to fight fellow Afghans.

But General Joe wants the Afghan army to prove its mettle in "fighting fellow Muslims and countrymen", as the Times puts it. It appears the US has a great fear that, without US boots on the ground and drones in the sky, the war will end, and with it, the Great (and very lucrative) Game.

However, it is the hope of most Afghans, and the goal of the Karzai government, not to kill Taliban, but to bring them into the government.

Or, as Maroofi explains, to recognise publicly that "the Taliban are already in the government, in the Parliament, in control of governorships" – but not openly. The talks among the frontline nations are to bring the Taliban back to its roots as a political organisation, not an armed insurgency.

Maroofi notes that there are some kinks to work out: Currently, female members of the Afghan parliament are fearful of attending with their not-yet-public Taliban colleagues.

"Taliban are Pashtun. They are citizens of Afghanistan. They have to have a place in our democracy." That's not what Uncle Sam wants to hear. President Barack Obama, the Drone Ranger, wants to convert Afghan forces into a kind of drone army, remotely controlled killers keeping the pot boiling.

Afghans, however, have had enough of playing proxy in someone else's war. And they see an opportunity to end the killing. It was taken as a matter of fact by all the Asian diplomats I met that, "The Taliban have been defeated" – militarily, that is; like the US army, they can't advance or hold ground. They are facing fellow Pashtuns (Karzai is one, of course), not the Northern Alliance of minorities that once controlled their opposition. The Taliban can't party like it's 1999.

Plus, the Taliban know there's a four-trillion-dollar carrot awaiting those who sign on to a peace agreement. The US Air Force has conducted a complete aerial survey of Afghan resources and released Russian assays measuring the nation's untapped mineral wealth in gold (in Badakshan), copper (Balkhab), iron (Haji-Gak), cobalt (Aynak), carbonatite (Khanneshin), tin (Dusar-Shaida) and more. Afghanistan could be the Saudi Arabia of rich rocks.

Left out of the published US reports (but something I dug out of old paper CIA files not purged from computers) was the most valuable stash of all: uranium, possibly the world's largest deposit. The Soviets secretly mined the uranium, using only imported Russian workers, until they were chased back home in 1988.

Uranium mining beats the hell out of the opium trade (which is slipping to Myanmar, anyway). The Karzai government's hope is to leave a path to wealth as its legacy, but that wealth can't be dug out until the soil above is free of land-mines and maniacs.

Chinese state companies are lining up in Kabul with shovels and signing bonuses. Maroofi likes Chinese companies – they're more likely to provide jobs than baksheesh. Unlike Western companies.

Baksheesh. Bribes. Corruption. It was this topic that set Maroofi on a long rip. Yes, Afghans have been showered with billions in bribes, backhanders and corrupt deals, but who's paying those bribes? Who's doing the corrupting?

"Karzai told defence contractor Lockheed Martin, ‘You give hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to my family and to my minister's families because you expect to buy influence. You're not getting influence, and you're not getting your money back, either.'"

Lockheed’s response is that it is required by US law to give contracts to the “most qualified” bidder, regardless of familial relationships with government. Any government, it seems: Lynn Cheney, Dick’s wife, was once on Lockheed’s Board of Directors.

(Maroofi gave me details of questionable contracts that are poisoning the entire system of governance. I intend to hunt down the facts, so watch this space.)

America’s front pages have been splashed this past week with the CIA’s admission that it has been sending bucket-loads of US currency to President Karzai’s office. No one suggests that Karzai has dipped his own hand into the buckets: the loot is for his dispersal among warlords who need a little TLC. For example, Uzbek berserker Abdul Rashid Dostum boasts of billing the CIA $800,000 per month to stay on the government’s side.

But Karzai simply can't control the buckets of system gone wild. Maroofi is particularly incensed that, "These US companies give millions to governors they know are splitting the money with the Taliban." One favourite racket is for the Taliban to take millions in bribes (via the governors) to let through shipments of material used to supply US forces in remote areas who are fighting the Taliban.

Right now, the Taliban are ready – if reluctantly – for the peace deal, in order to get a piece of the resource action. And they're astonished that, with that sonovabitch Osama dead, the US still holds a grudge.

Why? Face it: if Karzai can end the war, then the winner of the Great Game is… China. After all, the US has almost all the ore it needs under its own soil or within easy grabbing distance from Canada and Latin America. And unlike China, desperate for those gas pipelines from Kyrgyzstan and oil lines from the Caspian, the US has fracked natural gas and oil coming out its arse. Indeed, unleashing Afghanistan's resource riches will only crash the price of commodity reserves held by US companies.

Afghanistan's peace is China's economic life-line and America's commodity price recession.

General Joe is not worried about a sudden outbreak of peace. “You can accuse me of being an optimist and I’ll plead guilty,” as he looks forward to an Afghanistan trapped in a war without end. For US corporations, that means a profit centre without end. That's because, even after US troops go, the military-industrial gravy train – boarded by contractors, special ops mercenaries, “development” agencies and their fixers – will continue to roll.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, just named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

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[Astana, Kazakhstan]  Following the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, I received documents marked "SECRET" from the files of the FBI's Washington field office. The information in those files will make you sick.

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into joining me.  [Rocco, no fool, won't let me print his full name.]

After we landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and, yesterday, charged with hiding evidence of the bombers' guilt.

Here in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, televisions everywhere run endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably couldn't find on a map?

The second question: How did America's trillion-dollar intelligence apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber's connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra:  it's amazing what you don't see when you don't look.

And that's related to the how young Muslim-Americans came to kill other young Americans over Chechnya.

According to the secret memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11 attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America's Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn't be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, "that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden".

Hey, it was a family affair.  Camp Jihad was run by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called "ABL" – Abdullah Binladden, Osama's brother.

When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were arrested, I went back to that "SECRET" memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just two months after that "compassionate young man" Osama killed thousands in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center).

Why would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI.  They did not deny the authenticity of the secret documents.  Well, then, if the US government has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya (as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings?

The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself.  The FBI spokesman told us at BBC:

"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."


Well, what else are we not supposed to know?

We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a "clean" phone. The spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing the US government's half-assed—and half-illegal—support for these terrorists.

Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to roost.

As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, "It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials."

It's utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it's more than likely the elder brother's connections here in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past.

The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch. There's surprisingly little official scrutiny of the media's new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers' uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan's "I LOVE AMERICA" schtick, noted,

"[Ruslan's] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message of ‘promise and hope' sent by Tsarni."

I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge, first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard Ruslan's messages. Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International Organizations and has lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that "no one else ought to know" about our government playing footsie with terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in Boston.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated terror attacks on the US for BBC TV.

Readers can download Bush Family Fortunes, Palast's BBC documentary, without charge, at www.gregpalast.com/bffdownload/

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, just named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

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www.GregPalast.com

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You made fun of me when I suggested that President Barack Obama would nominate a confessed bank scammer, a loan-sharking mortgage predator, to his cabinet.  But thar she blows!

Today, Obama has named Penny Pritzker Secretary of Commerce. As the President says, It's a milestone:  the first female fraudster to hold that post. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration - because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet.

The following is taken from the Chapter, "Penny's from Heaven?" you'll find in my bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.  [Get a copy, I'll sign it, and you send it to the President.]

We never heard of this guy Barack Obama until 2004. Less than three years before taking the presidency, he was in the Illinois state senate, a swamp of scammers, backhanders, and party machine tools - not a stellar launch pad for the White House. And then, one day, state Sen. Barack Obama was visited by his fairy godmother. Her name is Penny Pritzker.

Pritzker's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust - at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators and the Commerce Department so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better - an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

So, in 2008, Summers and Geithner were put back in the saddle - Obama's horse but Rubin's saddle.

Rubin received more than $100 million from Citigroup, the gargantuan commercial bank/investment bank/casino created by deregulation. It is worth a mention that Rubin's centi-million-dollar payoff went unchallenged by Citi's new owner, the US Treasury, which had put up more than a trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to pull Rubin's creature out of bankruptcy.

Rubin rocked, but Penny was pissed off. Pritzker had taken this state senator/community organizer from the ghetto, made him a US Senator, then, as Obama's campaign finance chairwoman, raised a mind-blowing three-quarters of a billion dollars to make him president.

In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

Obama appeared to keep the door shut on Pritzker throughout the 2012 campaign, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time and last time anyone used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

By giving Penny, the Piggy Banker, Commerce, we have to change Obama's rating to sub-prime.

I do note that some woman's organizations are applauding the appointment of the first female to the Commerce post.  But I prefer to honor the victims of the Chicago femme fatale.  Most of Penny's victims, busted bank borrowers and underpaid health care workers, are women, too. But, unlike those wounded and destroyed by Pritzker, she worked hard for her money: it was not easy inheriting her first billion from her daddy.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago but has since gone legit.  View his reports for BBC Television, Vice Magazine and more at www.GregPalast.com

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, just named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

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The guy in the cheap brown windbreaker walking up the dirty tenement steps to my New York office looked like a bus driver.

Nicolas Maduro, elected President of Venezuela last Sunday, did indeed drive a bus, then led the drivers' union, then drove Chávez' laws through the National Assembly as Venezuela's National Assembly chief.

For one more week you can download Palast's short documentary, The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, originally filmed in Venezuela for BBC, without charge.

The central topic was the "Invisible Ring". Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: "That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence... which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring."

("Invisible Ring"? Someone at the State Department has read too many Alan Furst novels.)

On the grainy film, they worried that "Mr Corey" (a code name we easily cracked) would blow his cover and begin barking, "I am from the CIA! I am from the CIA!"

"Mr Corey" was certainly not from the CIA, an agency holding on to one last fig-leaf of discretion. This crew was far more dangerous, from a spy-for-hire corporation, Wackenhut Inc. I'd been tracking Wackenhut for years, ever since their spies – more Austin Powers than James Bond – were arrested while on a black-bag job for British Petroleum. They'd attempted to illegally tape a US Congressman by running a toy truck with a microphone through the ceiling vents over the lawmaker's head.

But even clowns, when heavily armed, can be deadly. In 2002, Chávez was kidnapped with the blessing of the US Ambassador right out of the presidential palace and flown by helicopter over the Caribbean where, Chávez later told me, the President assumed he'd be invited for a swim from 2,000 feet. Instead, just 48 hours later, Chávez was back at his desk.

But Washington wouldn't quit the coup business. New documents revealed several interlocked methods ("rings") for overthrowing Venezuela's elected government.

First, US operatives would monkey with voter registrations – and if that didn't steal the election from Chávez' party, the next step was to provoke riots against Chávez' elections "theft". The riots would lead to deaths – the deaths would be the excuse for the US to back another coup d'etat to "restore order" and "democracy" in Venezuela – and restore Venezuela's oil to Exxon. (Chávez had seized majority control of the oil fields and Exxon was furious.)

Maduro had already figured the US operatives wanted to use, "The collection of [voters'] signatures... to [occur] amidst a climate of violence and uncertainty, national and international uncertainty...To cause deaths the day of the collection of signatures."

Would this be to justify another coup?

Maduro said, "Yes: The justification to tell the world Chávez is a murderer, Chávez is a dictator, Chávez is a terrorist and the OAS [Organisation of American States] should intervene and Chávez should be ousted."

This week, the warlords of the rings are back in Caracas as, per the original script, the US State Department is backing opposition claims that Maduro's win is in question. And per the old playbook, the losers are taking to the streets, seven voters are dead (mostly Chávistas, but not all) and Caracas waits for the coup's next boot to drop.

Is a manoeuvre to remove Maduro far-fetched? George W Bush promoted the botched kidnapping of 2002. But it was the progressive Barack Obama who, in 2009, newly elected President, blessed the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

Still, it's fair to ask if Maduro and the Chávistas stole last week's presidential election?

Answer: They didn't have to. Even the Wall Street Journal accepts that, "for a majority of Venezuelans, Mr Chávez was a messiah," and Maduro, the successor Chávez chose from his deathbed, had too big a lead to lose.

Still, the election was nearly stolen – by the US-backed anti-Chávistas.

How? That's what Chávez wanted Maduro to find out from me: how could US operatives jerk with Venezuela's voter rolls? It wasn't a mere policy question: Maduro knew Chávez wouldn't be allowed to survive through another coup.

My answer: They could steal the vote the same way Bush did it in Florida – in fact, using the very same contractor. Take a look at these documents... from the pile I reviewed with Maduro:

According to this once-secret FBI memo, ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract – had shoplifted Venezuela's voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

I did ask myself how our national security apparatchiks could say that filching these voter rolls made our nation more secure? What were they for?

I had little doubt. In November 2000, working for the Observer and BBC Newsnight, I discovered that a subsidiary of ChoicePoint had, for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, obtained his state's voter rolls and "purged" more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, illegally denying them their vote. And that was how Jeb's brother, George W, won the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

And now ChoicePoint had the data to allow Homeland Security to do a Florida on Venezuela – and Honduras and the others. (In 2006, the candidate of the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the election but lost the Mexican presidency through gross ballot-box finagling.)

Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, "an election process that is the best in the world".

Here's how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It's as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.

Still, the guy who lost bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that's why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and "Third Ring" mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.

It won't succeed this time, either. Populist socialist governments have now replaced the juntas and stooges that once gave the US control of the Organisation of American States. And Venezuelans themselves won't let it happen.

What impressed me about Maduro and his boss Chávez was their reaction to the Third Ring and the attempted Florida-tion of their election. Instead of ordering mass arrests, Chávez' and Maduro's response was to strengthen democracy with a no-tricks voting system.

I should note that ChoicePoint, once exposed, apologised to Mexico's government, agreed to destroy its ill-gotten voter rolls and, soon thereafter, sold itself to a credit-rating company. Wackenhut fired its goof-ball spooks and sold itself off in pieces. Both deny knowingly breaking laws of any nation. And in Bush's US State Department, all hell broke loose, as UN Ambassador John Negroponte, sources verified, fumed over what he deemed a renegade neo-con escapade endangering remaining US oil interests. (In fact, Chevron ended up paying what I call a "coup tax".)

The vote was still close, mainly because Maduro – a sincere, competent administrator – is no singing-dancing-camera-perfect Sinatra of politics like Chávez was.

Secretary of State Kerry's challenge to Maduro's 270,000-vote victory margin struck me as particularly poignant. Because in 2004, besides Chávez, I gave another presidential candidate evidence of the Bush gang's ballot banditry: Senator John Kerry. Kerry lost to Bush by a slim 119,000 ballots in Ohio, blatantly stolen, but Kerry refused to call for a recount. It took him two years to publicly acknowledge our findings – when he introduced, with Senator Ted Kennedy, legislation to fix America's corrupted voting system, then let the proposed law die of neglect.

Chávez knew, and Kerry will never learn, that democracy requires more than a complete count – it requires complete courage.

Articles and Reports on Hugo Chavez by Greg Palast 

- The Guardian UK
Don't believe everything you read in the papers about Venezuela

- The Guardian UK
Opec chief warned Chavez about coup

- BBC Newsnight Report (VIDEO):
The Coup Against Hugo Chavez

- Cruisin' for a Bruisin' with Hugo

- Venezuela Floridated

- Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band

- BBC News
Chavez rules out return to cheap oil

- BBC Newsnight Report (VIDEO):
Chavez's Venezuela - Bush over a Barrel

- The Progressive
George Bush Should Get Down on his Knees and Kiss Hugo Chavez' Behind

- Fear of Chavez is Fear of Democracy

- Vice Magazine
The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez 
and the XL Pipeline

* * * * * * * *

Investigative reporter Greg Palast covered Venezuela for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine.

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

www.GregPalast.com

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