Rotten Denmark brings together several developments in Congressman John Conyer’s ongoing investigation of sketchy business in the Ohio vote. Looks like his team’s had less than perfect cooperation:

According to Joan Quinn and Eve Robertson, two election observers researching voting records, Greene County officials initially gave Quinn and Robertson access to poll records, and then abruptly withdrew such access. Greene County Director of Elections Carole Garman claimed that she had withdrawn access to the voting records at the direction of Secretary Blackwell. Regardless of who ordered the denial of this access, such an action appears to violate Ohio law. Later, at the same office, election observers found the office unlocked, and what appeared to be locked ballot boxes, unattended. Prior to the withdrawal of access to the books, observers had found discrepancies in election records, and possible evidence of minority vote suppression.

And one of the electronic voting companies doesn’t seem to be behaving:

Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton, states in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last Friday, in advance of the state’s recount, which is taking place this week. (Conyers is now asking FBI and County prosecutor to investigate.) Programmer Clint Curtis testified that he designed a program to hack the vote in Florida for Congressman Feeney.

Wired News says Triad patched the computer:

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, sought the investigation after an Ohio election official disclosed in an affidavit (.pdf) that an employee of Triad Governmental Systems, the company that wrote voting software used with punch-card machines in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties, dismantled Hocking County’s tabulation computer days before the recount and “put a patch on it.”

Here’s Clint Curtis’ testimony on writing software to change the results:

Q: And if you had a recount and no paper trail, would that be, as soon as that had happened, would that be reversible by seeing the discrepancy between the tabulator, the central tabulator code, and what the individual machines which had not been tampered with code?

A:Not if I wrote it.

Q: Why not? In other words…

A: In other words I could make it match.

Rumor is that Conyers is claiming the support of at least one Senator to demand answers in Congress. You can nudge them to do so here.

The Times reports on the FBI memos announced by the ACLU yesterday”:

One of the memorandums released Monday was addressed to Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, and other senior bureau officials, and it provided the account of someone “who observed serious physical abuses of civilian detainees” in Iraq. The memorandum, dated June 24 this year, was an “Urgent Report,” meaning that the sender regarded it as a priority. It said the witness “described that such abuses included strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings and unauthorized interrogations.” The memorandum did not make clear whether the witness was an agent or an informant, and it said there had also been an effort to cover up the abuses. The writer of the memorandum said Mr. Mueller should be aware of what was occurring because “of potential significant public, media and Congressional interest which may generate calls to the director.” The document does not provide further details of the abuse, but suggests that such treatment of prisoners in Iraq was the subject of an investigation conducted by the bureau’s Sacramento office.

In one memorandum, dated Dec. 5, 2003, an agent whose name is blanked out on the document expressed concern about military interrogators’ posing as F.B.I. agents at the Guantánamo camp. The agent wrote that the memorandum was intended as an official record of the interrogators’ behavior because, “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, D.O.D. interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done by ‘F.B.I.’ interrogators. The F.B.I. will be left holding the bag before the public.” D.O.D. is an abbreviation for the Department of Defense. Asked about the possible impersonation of F.B.I. agents by military personnel, Bryan Whitman, the deputy Pentagon spokesman, said Monday that “It is difficult to determine from the secondhand description whether the technique” was permissible.

America needs a raise:

In only four of the nation’s 3,066 counties can someone working full-time and earning federal minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment, an advocacy group on low-income housing reported Monday. A two-bedroom rental is even more of a burden — the typical worker must earn at least $15.37 an hour to pay rent and utilities, the National Low Income Housing Coalition said in its annual “Out of Reach” report. That’s nearly three times the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.

Elliot Spitzer certifies that a majority of Columbia’s teaching assistants have joined GSEU and are calling for recognition:

A majority of Columbia University’s graduate teaching and research assistants have indicated they want to form a union, the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said yesterday. Mr. Spitzer’s office does not have formal authority over recognizing unions, but the students asked Mr. Spitzer’s office to count the cards they signed in support of a union.
The move was part of a wider campaign of pressure against Columbia. Graduate Student Employees United, a group affiliated with the United Automobile Workers, is seeking to unionize nearly 2,000 graduate assistants at Columbia. But last July, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate assistants at private universities were students, not workers, and therefore did not have the right to form a union, even when a majority wanted one. Despite that ruling, the graduate students’ group is seeking to pressure Columbia into recognizing such a union. Susan Brown, a Columbia spokeswoman, said the university was abiding by the N.L.R.B. ruling.

Damning:

A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as “torture” and a June 2004 “Urgent Report” to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up. “These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers.” The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.” The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from “On Scene Commander–Baghdad” to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using “torture techniques” against a detainee. The e-mail concludes “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public.” The document also says that no “intelligence of a threat neutralization nature” was garnered by the “FBI” interrogation, and that the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department’s actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail’s author writes that he or she is documenting the incident “in order to protect the FBI.”

The speech I’d like to see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi deliver:

Fifty years ago, a great Republican declared, “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security….you would not hear of that party again.” We have come before you because today’s Republican party, hijacked by the radical right and beholden to Wall Street special interests, has set out to do just that. We are here today as leaders of the Democratic Party to make absolutely clear our position on their plan to kill social security by a thousand cuts.

We will not allow social security to be sold off to the highest bidder on our watch. It is not a get rich quick scheme for a lucky few. It is a sacred compact from one generation to the next. It enshrines a core principle of our shared American Dream: That a lifetime of hard work, even if your job is none too glamorous, even though you may be no market wizard, deserves retirement with full dignity and financial security. The American people would no sooner stake this economic security on the ebb and flow of the Dow than we would our very national security. We will not compromise the freedom of Americans who have devoted a lifetime to building this country to spend the final chapter of their lives enjoying a measure of the great prosperity of this blessed nation. It is this economic freedom – the freedom made possible with a roof over one’s head, food on one’s table, and life-saving medication – which the President’s party would ransom off in the name of free enterprise.

They have not set their sights on social security because it is imperiled, but because it is successful. They are fanning the flames of fear not because social security is unpopular, but rather because it is, rightly, the most popular government program of our time. It is a shining testament to the power of the American social contract to improve the lives of all our citizens. At a time of record deficit spending, social security is running a surplus which, with no change at all, can pay promised benefits for the next half century. Even after that point, an increase in spending by the wealthiest Americans, who today pay a smaller percentage of their income than their employees into the system – an increase dwarfed by the tax cuts President Bush paid out to the wealthiest Americans – will keep the system in the black into the next century. Social security should be celebrated, not assailed; strengthened, not eroded; and sustained, not degraded.

It is the President’s party, practicing the politics of cynicism and cronyism, which would pit the oldest and youngest members of our society against each other and tell us there is not enough prosperity to lift up both. The American people know better. Social security, through the hard work of the American worker, will provide the benefits promised to our parents, and to our children, and to all of us as well. We reject any plan which curtails benefits to the workers of today or of tomorrow. We reject any plan which would saddle our shared economy now or in the future with unsustainable debt. We will oppose any attempt to weaken social security with every political resource at our disposal, knowing that there is none stronger than the overwhelming will of the American people. We will stand united in telling those who peddle privatization, be they on Wall Street or in the White House: Our futures are not yours to gamble. You will not narrow the margins of our dreams.

Iran’s Judiciary forces journalists to say they weren’t tortured:

The Iranian judiciary is using threats of lengthy prison sentences and coerced televised statements in an attempt to cover up its arbitrary detention and torture of internet journalists and civil society activists, Human Rights Watch said today. Since September, more than 20 internet journalists and civil society activists have been arrested and held in a secret detention center in Tehran. Most have since been released on bail. In a public letter to President Mohammed Khatami on December 10, the father of one of those detained, Ali Mazroi—who is also president of the Association of Iranian Journalists and a former member of parliament—implicated the judiciary in the torture and secret detention of the detainees.

Immediately afterwards, the chief prosecutor of Tehran, Judge Saeed Mortazavi, filed charges against Mazroi for libel. On December 11, Mortazavi ordered the detention of three of the released detainees—Omid Memarian, Shahram Rafizadeh and Ruzbeh Mir Ebrahimi—as witnesses for the prosecution in the case. These three journalists and Javad Gholam Tamayomi, a journalist who has been in detention since October 18, were brought to Mortazavi’s office. Mortazavi threatened the four detainees with lengthy prison sentences if they did not deny Mazroi’s allegations. They were interrogated for three consecutive days for eight hours each day. On December 14, the four detainees were brought in front of a televised “press conference” arranged by Judge Mortazavi, and forced to deny that they had been subjected to solitary confinement, torture and ill-treatment during their earlier detention. That evening, Iran’s government-controlled television news broadcast videotapes that showed the four detainees saying that their jailors treated them as “gently as flowers.”

Evan writes up his comments from the GESO membership meeting Tuesday night:

I hope everyone’s taken a good look at the teaching of foreign languages: it’s a model coming soon to an academic discipline near you, if the corporate university gets its way. Casualization, this reliance on grad students, part-time and non-tenured faculty, has encouraged academic workers of all kinds all around the country to stand up and fight for their unions. Here at Yale, 70% of classroom hours are taught by grad students, adjuncts or lecturers off the tenure track; that is, by workers with unfair pay scales, insufficient benefits, and zero job security. When almost 100 of us in the languages and literatures wrote to President Levin and Provost Hockfield last spring seeking dialogue about the damage casualization has done to scholarship in our fields, they wrote back and claimed the problem doesn’t even exist. “No one would debate” that casualization hurts education, they wrote, but then they proceeded to debate it. The facts remain: Spanish at Yale is primarily taught by an army of 26 adjuncts. Yale is no exception to what is a national crisis in academic labor. It’s a national problem, so let’s be realistic – it will need a national solution: national standards upheld by binding union contracts that hold universities committed to supporting tenure and ensuring the working conditions of all academic workers. GESO, in building a coalition with the UAW at Columbia and the AFT at Penn, is starting this work today by calling for recognition. After we’re recognized, we will grow our coalition to include more of the 40,000 grad students already covered by union contracts, and together, we’ll win national standards, we’ll restore dignity to all lines of teaching and research, and we’ll take the academy back for the people who make it work. Let’s take it back, let’s vote yes.

Vote yes they did – unanimously. Press write-ups here, here, and here.

More killing in Iraq:

Car bombs rocked Iraq’s two holiest Shiite cities Sunday, killing at least 58 people and wounding more than 95, while in downtown Baghdad dozens of gunmen carried out a brazen ambush that killed three Iraqi employees of the organization running next month’s elections. The bombings came just over an hour apart. First, a suicide blast ripped through minibuses at the entrance of the main bus station in the city of Karbala. Then a car bomb went off in a central square of Najaf crowded with people watching a funeral proccession, also attended by the city police chief and provincial governor. The violence was the latest in an insurgent campaign to disrupt the crucial Jan. 30 elections, the first national polls since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The car bomb in Najaf detonated in central Maidan Square where a large crowd of people had gathered for the funeral procession of a tribal sheik — about 100 yards from where Gov. Adnan al-Zurufi and police chief Ghalib al-Jazaari were standing. Youssef Munim, head of the statistics department at Najaf’s al-Hakim Hospital, said 30 people were killed by the explosion and 65 were wounded. But an Associated Press reporter who entered the hospital’s morgue counted 45 people killed by the blast.