Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

George W. Bush and his inner circle, photographed in the Cabinet Room of the White House in December 2001. From left: Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, the president, National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, C.I.A. director George Tenet (seated), and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.

by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum
With assistance from Philippe Sands.

January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battle in Florida whose outcome is effectively decided by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. In foreign affairs he promises an approach that will depart from the perceived adventurism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in places such as Kosovo and Somalia. (“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said in a debate with his opponent, Al Gore.) In domestic affairs Bush pledges to cut taxes and improve education. He promises to govern as a “compassionate conservative” and to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He comes into office with a $237 billion budget surplus.

On the day of the inauguration the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, declares a moratorium on the Clinton administration’s last-minute regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. This action is followed in the coming months by disengagement from the International Criminal Court and other international efforts. Nonetheless, the early presumption is that the administration’s affairs are in steady hands, though some disquieting signs are noted.

In the Oval Office on January 20 the first President Bush and the new President Bush greet each other with the words “Mr. President.”

Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: It was a bitterly cold day. They got back to the residence from the inauguration. The president was going over to have his first moment in the Oval Office as president of the United States. And he called for his father because he wanted his father to be there when it happened. If I recall correctly, George H. W. Bush was soaking in the tub trying to warm up, because it had been so cold on the viewing stand. Not only did the former president quickly get out of the tub, but he put his suit back on, because he was not going to enter the Oval Office without a suit. His hair was still kind of wet.

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.

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Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

Republican IT consultant Michael Connell, who was killed on December 19 when his Piper Saratoga crashed near the Akron-Canton Airport, had declared an emergency shortly before losing contact with air traffic control.

According to a preliminary incident report filed by the safety division of the Federal Aviation Administration on December 22, “The plane was on ILS (Instrument Landing System) approach to runway 23. Tower noted plane left of course. Tower directed plane to climb and maintain 3000 feet and didn’t comply. When advised to climb a second time, the pilot declared an emergency and was lost from radar shortly thereafter.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has now posted a more complete report, but one which still leaves unresolved both the exact nature of Connell’s emergency and the cause of the crash.

According to the NTSB, Connell initially contacted air traffic control (ATC) at the Akron-Canton Airport to ask whether there were any reports of icing and was told there were none. His approach was then uneventful until ATC noted that he was left of his course and asked if he would like to be resequenced. Connell replied “correcting.” ATC then advised him again that he was “well left of the localizer” and Connell responded that he would “like to correct.”

The report continued, “N9299N [Connell's plane] was about 2 ½ miles from the airport when it then transmitted if it could execute a 360-degree turn. ATC then instructed N9299N to climb and maintain 3,000 feet and queried N9299N’s present heading. N9299N transmitted, ‘heading due north and climbing.’ N9299N then declared an emergency.”

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Philip Greenspun

I had a chat with a guy at Adobe Systems the other day. The latest version of Adobe Photoshop CS4 can’t read Kodak PhotoCDs. Why not? Kodak was the author of the plug-in that enabled Photoshop to read the proprietary file format and isn’t supporting the code anymore (the Kodak Web page on the subject hasn’t been updated since 1998; another Kodak page says “this product is discontinued. Kodak no longer offers technical support by telephone or e-mail.” The company apparently can’t even be bothered to maintain a list of links to software that can read these disks.

Why should Kodak support this format? Merely to be nice to the tens of thousands of customers who purchased millions of disks from them? Perhaps not. Kodak has already pocketed their money and can’t expect to get more from this particular product (though the PhotoCD customers were probably Kodak’s biggest and most loyal customers overall). However, the company may yet want to try to sell something innovative. Who in their right mind would take a risk on an Eastman Kodak technology now, knowing that the company wouldn’t pay a programmer for two weeks per year to make sure that PhotoCDs were still readable by Photoshop and other common applications?

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By ADAM COHEN

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

The Milgram experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocents. Professor Milgram devised a clever way of testing, in a laboratory setting, man’s (and woman’s) willingness to do evil.

The participants — ordinary residents of New Haven — were told they were participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning. A “learner” was strapped in a chair in an adjacent room, and electrodes were attached to the learner’s arm. The participant was told to read test questions, and to administer a shock when the learner gave the wrong answer.

The shocks were not real. But the participants were told they were — and instructed to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. At 150 volts, the participant could hear the learner cry in protest, complain of heart pain, and ask to be released from the study. After 330 volts, the learner made no noise at all, suggesting he was no longer capable of responding. Through it all, the scientist in the room kept telling the participant to ignore the protests — or the unsettling silence — and administer an increasingly large shock for each wrong answer or non-answer.

The Milgram experiment’s startling result — as anyone who has taken a college psychology course knows — was that ordinary people were willing to administer a lot of pain to innocent strangers if an authority figure instructed them to do so. More than 80 percent of participants continued after administering the 150-volt shock, and 65 percent went all the way up to 450 volts.

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By Niall Ferguson

It was the year when people finally gave up trying to predict the year ahead. It was the year when every forecast had to be revised – usually downwards – at least three times. It was the year when the paradox of globalisation was laid bare for all to see, if their eyes weren’t tightly shut.

On the one hand, the increasing integration of markets for commodities, manufactures, labour and capital had led to great gains. As Adam Smith had foreseen in The Wealth of Nations, economic liberalisation had allowed the division of labour and comparative advantage to operate on a global scale. From the 1980s until 2007, the world economy had enjoyed higher, more widespread growth and fewer, less severe crises – hence Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s hubristic celebration of a “great moderation” in 2004.

On the other hand, the more the world came to resemble an intricate, multi-nodal network operating at maximum efficiency – with minimal inventories and just-in-time delivery – the more vulnerable it became to a massive systemic crash.

That was the true significance of the Great Repression which began in August 2007 and reached its nadir in 2009. It was clearly not a Great Depression on the scale of the 1930s, when output in the US declined by as much as a third and unemployment reached 25 per cent. Nor was it merely a Big Recession. As output in the developed world continued to decline throughout 2009 – despite the best efforts of central banks and finance ministries – the tag “Great Repression” seemed more and more apt: although this was the worst economic crisis in 70 years, many people remained in deep denial about it.

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Some who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.

Kathy M. Kristof

One in a series of occasional stories

Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara.

She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined.

“I don’t have all this debt because I was buying stuff,” said Hickey, who now lives in Texas. “I was just trying to pay tuition, living on ramen noodles and doing everything as cheaply as I could.”

Hickey got caught in an increasingly common trap in the nation’s $85-billion student loan market. She borrowed heavily, presuming that all her debt was part of the federal student loan program.

But most of the money she borrowed was actually in private loans, the fastest-growing segment of the student loan market. Private loans have no relation to the federal loan program, with one exception: In many cases, they are offered by the same for-profit companies that provide federally funded student loans.

As a result, some students who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.
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Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and other top Bush officials could soon face legal jeopardy.

Jonathan Tepperman
Newsweek Web Exclusive

The United States, like many countries, has a bad habit of committing wartime excesses and an even worse record of accounting for them afterward. But a remarkable string of recent events suggests that may finally be changing—and that top Bush administration officials could soon face legal jeopardy for prisoner abuse committed under their watch in the war on terror.

In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration’s extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo. Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld’s behavior a “direct cause” of abuse. Analysts say it gives a green light to prosecutors, and supplies them with political cover and factual ammunition. Administration officials, with a few exceptions, deny wrongdoing. Vice President Dick Cheney says there was nothing improper with U.S. interrogation techniques—”we don’t do torture,” he repeated in an ABC interview on Dec. 15. The government blamed the worst abuses, such as those at Abu Ghraib, on a few bad apples.

High-level charges, if they come, would be a first in U.S. history. “Traditionally we’ve caught some poor bastard down low and not gone up the chain,” says Burt Neuborne, a constitutional expert and Supreme Court lawyer at NYU. Prosecutions may well be forestalled if Bush issues a blanket pardon in his final days, as Neuborne and many other experts now expect. (Some see Cheney’s recent defiant-sounding admission of his own role in approving waterboarding as an attempt to force Bush’s hand.)
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by John Nichols

Forty years ago, America’s cultural icons expressed the frustratation of the American people with the failure of then-President Lyndon Johnson to end this country’s undeclared war in Vietnam by boldly demanding peace.

The most respected newsman in the nation, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, explained to a national television audience after the Tet Offensive that the war had gone horribly awry.

Singer Johnny Cash, whose music and style had made him a hero of blue-collar Americans, described himself as “a dove with claws” and began singing the anti-war song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”

The Smothers Brothers variety show was censored when it attempted to air a segment featuring Harry Belafonte singing in front of images of student protesters clashing with the police. CBS executives reportedly feared that the implicit anti-war message would offend President Johnson and his aides.

But the most direct and powerful anti-war statement of the period was delived by singer Eartha Kitt, then at the height of her celebrity.

Kitt, the sultry singer of hits such as “Santa Baby” who died at age 81 on Christmas Day, was in 1968 an internationally-acclaimed music star who had begun making major stage and screen appearances. So it came as no great surprise when she was invited to a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson.

But the First Lady was surprised when she asked Kitt about the Vietnam War.

“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” the singer told the First Lady and the 50 other women at the luncheon. “They rebel in the street. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

The First Lady reportedly burst into tears.

The president was furious.

Kitt was blacklisted. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA, and ended up on the “Enemies List” of Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon.

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Tiny Iceland Created a Vast Bubble, Leaving Wreckage Everywhere When It Popped

By CHARLES FORELLE

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — A boy charged to the front of an angry crowd here recently and tossed a carton of skyr, a popular local yogurt-like snack, at the Parliament building. It splattered on the rough-hewn stone.

He and thousands of Icelanders were protesting one of the strangest economic failures of the global financial crisis. This past fall, every bank that matters in this tiny nation — that is, all three of them — failed. Iceland’s currency, the krona, became worthless beyond its shores. The country’s financial system stopped working.

“We are pissed off at the government,” said one young man, pausing between fusillades of eggs. A roll of toilet paper arced across the Nordic sky.

Voices of Anger, Shame in Iceland

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In the whipping wind, a woman held a cardboard with a screaming mouth on Nov. 21.

Iceland is an extreme casualty of an era in which it became extraordinarily easy to borrow money. But it was more than that: An examination of the nation’s banking system, which collapsed over about 10 days this autumn, reveals the degree to which Iceland was one of the international financial bubble’s most enthusiastic players. Home to fewer people than Wichita, Kan., Iceland became so leveraged and so deeply intertwined with the global financial infrastructure that its collapse has rattled the world from Tokyo to California to the Middle East.

In Japan and Hong Kong, bond buyers got stuck holding all-but-worthless debt. In Beverly Hills, a real-estate developer was forced to default after teaming up with an Icelandic bank to build condos near Wilshire Boulevard. A German regional lender, Bayerische Landesbank, suffered big losses on its Icelandic investments contributing to its need for a €30 billion ($42 billion) bailout package.

And in recent weeks, Naomi House, a hospice in southern England, had to cancel a service in which aides made house calls to give the parents of dying children a helping hand. Some £5.7 million ($8.7 million) — two-thirds of its available cash — is frozen and may never be fully returned. It was deposited in an Icelandic bank.

Khalid Aziz, chairman of the hospice trust, says he didn’t think twice back in 2005 when Icelanders bought the local bank. “With the globalization of markets,” he says, “everybody owns everything these days, don’t they?”

Reindeer, Gooseberries

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by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove’s election thief in chief should send a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don’t be riding in any small private planes.

Death by air crash now seems to be the favored means of ridding the Rovian right of troublesome characters.

The most recent is Michael Connell, who died Friday night when his private plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. Connell was the information techology whiz kid who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, along with a few in between—possibly including the 2002 senatorial campaign in Minnesota that followed the death of Paul Wellstone.

Connell was an expert pilot whose plane crashed in clear weather. He held virtually all the secrets to how George W. Bush was illegally foisted on the American people—and the world—for eight horrifying years. By manipulating computerized results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 Connell made history. By some accounts, he was about to tell the attorneys in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit how he did it. He also approached expressed a willingness to appear under oath before Congress. But now he is dead.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

He now joins such critical players as Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more critical public figures who have died in small plane crashes at questionable moments.

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By Scott Horton

Michael Connell was well-known to those who follow the “black box” voting drama. A voting technology expert from Akron, Ohio, Connell faithfully served the Republican Party, and in particular its chief electoral guru, Karl Rove–faithfully, that is, up until a few months ago. Under subpoena and court order, Connell was compelled to testify about his role in managing the 2004 election tabulations in Ohio. In that race, Connell both served as information technology consultant to the Bush-Cheney campaign and, under contract with the state of Ohio, managed the vote tabulation from servers he maintained in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He emerged as the focal witness in the current controversy over voting machine manipulation in Ohio. In 2004 exit polls put Kerry on top, but official results in black box districts, strongly at variance with the exit polls, gave the state, and the race, to Bush. After Connell was reportedly threatened by Karl Rove, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the litigation appealed to Attorney General Mukasey for protection late last summer. Now Connell is dead, the victim of a crash on the approach of his plane to the Akron airport on Friday. The Akron Beacon Journal reports:

Mr. Connell, founder and chief executive of New Media Communications in Richfield, died instantly when the single-prop airplane he was piloting crashed into a vacant house about three miles short of the Akron-Canton Airport. State Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Sheppard said Mr. Connell’s plane was in communication with the airport control tower just before the crash, but he could not detail whether the radio transmissions were calls for help. “We have no reason to believe at this point it was anything other than an unfortunate crash,” Sheppard said.

Connell had recently come into public view in connection with a lawsuit raising allegations of vote fraud in 2004:

…the lawsuit alleges that by 9 p.m. on Election Night 2004, the results were switched from the state server to one set up by Connell’s, in the former Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tenn. It is alleged the same server was used to bundle and remove White House e-mails regarding the 2005 federal prosecutor firing scandal. Mr. Connell tried to fight the subpoena, but a judge ruled against it and he gave a deposition on Nov. 3. It was through the fight over the subpoena that attorneys who brought the case learned that Mr. Connell and his wife had allegedly been threatened with federal prosecution by Rove.

Bob Fitrakis, one of the Columbus attorneys who filed the lawsuit, a former Green Party candidate for president and a political blogger known for his conspiracy theories on election stealing in Ohio, said word of Mr. Connell’s death ‘’sent a chill down my spine.”

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by Larisa Alexandrovna

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by Larisa Alexandrovna

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WASHINGTON — A high-ranking Interior Department official tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species over five years, a new inspector general report finds, concluding she exerted improper political interference on many more rulings than previously thought.

Julie MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service, did pervasive harm to the department’s morale and integrity and may have risked the well-being of species with her agenda, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney said in his report out Monday.

The Interior Department last year reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found that MacDonald had applied political pressure in those cases. The new report looked at nearly two dozen other endangered species decisions not examined in the earlier report. It found MacDonald directly interfered with at least 13 decisions and indirectly affected at least two more.

MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, resigned in May 2007. Department employees reported that they used her name as a verb _ encountering political interference from senior managers was called “getting MacDonalded.”

Devaney said “MacDonald’s zeal to advance her agenda has caused considerable harm to the integrity of the ESA program and to the morale and reputation” of the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as potential harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act.

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Consumers and Farmers Join Together to Promote Organic Integrity

CORNUCOPIA, Wisconsin – December 3 – Many media outlets, from the New York Times to the blogosphere, have tracked what has been dubbed the “corporate takeover” of organic farming.  One of the hottest controversies in this rapidly growing $20 billion industry has been giant factory farms milking thousands of cows each in feedlots and masquerading as organic.  Some of these industrial dairies are controlled by the nation’s largest agribusinesses.

Since the organic community first appealed to the USDA for better clarification and enforcement of regulations requiring organic dairy producers to graze their cattle, nearly 9 years ago, the number of giant industrial dairy operations, with as many as 10,000 cows, has grown from two to approximately 15.  After years of delay, the USDA has finally responded with a new proposed rule that they said would crack down on abuses.

“The birds have come home to roost,” said Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for The Cornucopia Institute.  The Wisconsin-based farm policy research group estimates there are 35,000 to 45,000 cows on giant CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) operating in the United States producing as much as 40% of the nation’s organic milk supply.

“These CAFOs are producing so much milk that they have depressed pricing and profit margins for organic family farmers, and now some are being forced out of business by this distressing situation,” Kastel said.  “Organics was supposed to be the antidote to family farmers being forced off the land.”

The Cornucopia Institute has filed formal legal complaints with the USDA aimed at compelling the agency to enforce organic livestock and management rules.  These actions have led to the shut down or penalizing of some of what they call “organic scofflaws.”  But many in the industry criticized the agency for failing to fully investigate many other alleged violations on giant farms, including several that supply milk to the nation’s largest dairy processor, Dallas-based Dean Foods.

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The Fair Food Foundation crumbles under weight of the Madoff Ponzi scheme

by Tom Philpott

For a couple of years, there has been lots of buzz in the sustainable-food world about the Fair Food Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Fair Food was founded recently by Oran Hesterman, under whose leadership the Kellogg Foundation became the key funder in the sustainable-food space. Kellogg has been pulling back from that space; Fair Food, which was gearing up to begin giving $20 million per year, was expected to fill the void.

Today brings a stunning announcement: Fair Food is closing down. In an email message I obtained from the Comfood listserv, Hesterman wrote that the funds of the foundation’s main donors had been managed by Bernard Madoff, the financial operator who has been accused of defrauding his clients of billions of dollars.

The wealth of Fair Food’s donors, Jeanne and Kenneth Levy-Church, has evaporated in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. As a result, “We will be spending the next few weeks closing down our operation,” Hesterman says.

The New York-based JHET Foundation, which funds social justice and participatory-democracy projects to the tune of $30 million per year, also relies on donations from the Levy-Churches. It, too, has collapsed, Crain’s Detroit reports.

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It’s been a year of mindboggling statistics and silly money, of soaring debts, collapsing stock prices and astounding events.

When Northern Rock collapsed last year, did you think, “We’re going to have to nationalise the rest of them too”. No, me neither.

I also bet you didn’t work out that the part-nationalisation of our banking sector would cost you at least £8,000 in taxes. And this is just the beginning.

Here are some other surprising, dispiriting and utterly disturbing statistics from the financial credit crunch which has ravaged our financial sector, broken the back of our economy and produced a recession that could be the worst for many generations.

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Thomas B. Edsall

At 3:31 PM Friday, December 19, Michael L. Connell, a top Internet consultant for the Republican National Committee and for the Bush and McCain presidential campaigns, left Washington from the small airport in College Park, Md. Alone at the helm of a single engine Piper Saratoga, Connell’s flight plan anticipated arrival at his hometown Akron-Canton Airport in a little over two hours, at 5:43 PM.

Instead, about three miles short of the Akron-Canton Airport, Connell’s plane crashed to the ground in an upscale section of Lake Township, killing Connell instantly. “I was standing in the kitchen and I looked out the window and all I saw was fire,” Taylor Fano told The Akron Beacon Journal. “It took out the flagpole and the cement blocks surrounding the flagpole . . . . It skidded across the driveway and right in-between a line of pine trees and a small fence around an in-ground pool.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the accident and has not yet filed a report, but there was no immediate evidence of wrong-doing or sabotage.

Nonetheless, Connell’s death provoked a groundswell of commentary among conspiracy theorists on the web, including Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story, Velvet Revolution, ePluribus Media, and TheZoo.

The most common unsubstantiated allegation on these sites is that Connell was about to provide crucial information in the case of alleged vote fraud in the 2004 Ohio presidential contest, and that that information would implicate Karl Rove and others in the Bush administration. Just last month, Connell was deposed in the ongoing case, King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell. According to accounts of the November 3rd deposition, Connell denied any knowledge of attempts to fraudulently manipulate 2004 Ohio vote counts.

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