Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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During a Wednesday press confernce, Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA), a former marine, revealed that an ongoing military investigation will show that Marines killed innocent women and children "in cold blood". The incident happened in Haditha, Iraq on November 19, 2005.

While the Pentagon's investigation has not been completed, Murtha reported:

At the time of the incident, a Marine spokesman said that 15 innocent civilians had been killed in a roadside bomb explosion and 8 insurgents were killed by U.S. Marines in a related gun battle.

Outraged locals reported a very different version of events. The Marines forcefully entered a home and murdered 15 unarmed civialians. There had been no explosion from a roadside bomb. There were no insurgents in the area. The Pentagon flatly denied the Iraqi's version of events.

We first reported on this incident on March 22, 2006 with video evidence (see our flash video or wmv video) that the Pentagon's version of events were largely a fabrication. The Haditha video evidence, shot by an Iraqi film student, showed the aftermath of the murders in Haditha. Unarmed bodies of women children were seen slain in praying positions. The walls were covered with blood and bullet holes.

A 9 year old girl survived the Haditha massacre and was able to provide an eyewitness account of the crimes. In the video at the beginning of this article (pictured at left), the 9 year old girl describes what she witnessed, "The American's came into my room where my father was praying. They went to my grandmother and killed her too. I heard an explosion. They threw a grenade under my grandfather's bed."

The Haditha video evidence was eventually obtained by Time Magazine and broadcast on Arab television. The Pentagon gave way to public pressure and opened an investigation into the killings at Haditha. We can't help but wonder how many other atrocities have been ignored or covered-up due to a lack of public evidence and public pressure?

This video contains yesterday's report from the UK's Channel 4 News. Then, in an interview on MSNBC, Rep. Jack Murtha can barely contain his frustration with Bush Administration's Iraq "policy" which he blames for creating overwhelming stress on American soldiers. The playing time is about 8 minutes.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

For the most part the news from Pennsylvania has been pretty good. The ES&S iVotronics and Danaher 1242s seem to have had a problem providing the poll opening zero tape but that seems to be the biggest problem reported. In Indiana an investigation by the Secretary of State's office found that ES&S may have committed around 30 violations of the Indiana Election Code. More on this will be coming out soon. And in Florida the LWV has stopped doing voter registrations and has filed a suit against the SoS and Division of Elections for draconian fines that can now be levied against any organization doing voter registration work for filing the forms late even when it is not the organizations fault....

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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CNN's Lou Dobbs interviews former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern on Lt. General Hayden's nomination to be CIA Director. McGovern insist that Hayden's circumvented the FISA law and the U.S. Constitution when he followed Bush's order to listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant.

In the past, Hayden has shown to be a person who strictly followed the rule that the NSA and the CIA do not spy on Americans. Hayden has been known to push back against orders that breech the threshold of domestic spying. Since September 11th, Hayden gave way to Administration pressure to do domestic spying.

Hayden eventually created and defended the most publicly known program of warrantless domestic eavesdropping. In this case, one end of the call originates in the U.S. and the other end of the call is a foreign location. The FISA law and the Fourth Amendment require a warrant to listen to any domestic source (regardless of who is on the other end of the call.)

From the CNN transcript:

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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This video provides some background to a special story posted on THE BRAD BLOG yesterday, by White House Correspondent Eric Brewer of BTC News. During a White House press conference, Eric Brewer asked about reports of the Patriot Act being used to spy on journalists. The video is an interview with ABC's Brian Ross who first reported that the Patriot Act is being used to spy on journalists.

White House Press Secretary issued a rather weak denial. Snow denied that National Security Letters, enabled by the Patriot Act, were being used to spy on journalists. He then said that National Security Letters were only concerned with Foreign to Domestic calls so "the pieces just don't add up." (see: Eric Brewer's article for Snow's full response.)

Snow's answer was misleading and possibly wrong. The FBI can issue National Security Letters (NSL) to collect personal records for a target and all of that target's contacts. In this way, a single NSL can collect records for a social network of hundreds of people. Organizations that are ordered to hand over their customer's information via an NSL are immediately gagged from revealing the NSL to anyone. Last year, the FBI targeted about 3500 Americans using NSL's without a warrant or the approval of any court. The FBI investigates domestic crimes; NSL's issued by the FBI are certainly being used to spy on Americans.

In this video, Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! interviews ABC's Brian Ross who was first to report that the federal government was spying on ABC News and other media organizations. Some of what Ross says is truly shocking and should give every American pause.

The video consists of about 7 minutes of clips from the Brian Ross interview. The entire 16 minute interview is available at DemocracyNow!.

Keep reading for a few selected quotes from the Ross interview...

John Conyers op/eds in tomorrow's WaPo on Impeachment. Or a lack thereof. Or otherwise responds to the strawman nonsense from the Republicans of late running on the notion that a vote for Dems this fall is a vote for impeachment of Bush by the incoming Judiciary Committee Chair, John Conyers.

While it may ultimately turn out to be a vote for impeachment, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will have only themselves to blame. Not John Conyers.

And, as one might expect, his response in WaPo to those sad charges and transparently desperate attempts to scare America, displays his usual grace, dignity and old-style statesmanship...in stark contrast to the nattering nabobs of fear-mongering that are today's disgraceful Congressional Republicans.

Not to give anything away, since we hope you'll read the whole thing, but the last line underscores why John Conyers is a hero for all times...

Bravo. And thank you, sir.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

From Arkansas today we learn that ES&S is selling vvpat thermal paper rolls for $8.50 per roll and each roll will handle around 100 voters. A quick search of paper suppliers shows that the same paper can be purchased retail for $50 to $60 for a case of 50 rolls. ES&S wants to milk and bilk every single penny they can from their customers. A large majority of the news from Pennsylvania was in praise of the myriad of new voting machines being used throughout the state. I'm not sure if this is because everything worked well or because the media has not been given all of the facts. Let's hope it is the former and not the later. There were few voting machine problems reported from Kentucky today. However, some local election officials seem to have found a new way to scam the machines as they tell voters not to finalize their votes. Voters walked away from the machines and poll workers then may have gone in and changed the votes....

Philadelphia Daily News: "Despite a couple hard-fought state House battles, on a light-turnout Primary Election Day, the only thing people wanted to smash were the voting machines. Hundreds failed across the city."

The report goes on to quote a city commissioner who says that between "200 and 300" of their voting machines broke down yesterday.

Working on a bunch of stuff...so more later...

Special to BRAD BLOG by BTC News White House Correspondent Eric Brewer

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question:

Tony denied the allegation, saying:

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Hidden amongst the smoke and mirrors of Bush's plan to boost sinking poll numbers, pander to his base enact immigration reform, the media largely missed revelations that Vice President Dick Cheney has been directly implicated in the CIA leak case.

MSNBC's Countdown managed to sneak in this short report about the new details of Cheney's involvement. My apologies for not posting this video sooner but the issue is still relevant and deserves further scrutiny.

A recent court filing by Patrick Fitzgerald includes Cheney's handwritten notes on a copy of Joe Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed. According to Fitzgerald, the handwritten notes show "the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president". In his notes, Cheney writes talking points that are later leaked to the press and used to smear Joe Wilson.

Christy Harden Smith of Firedoglake writes,

In an interview on MSNBC, Richard Wolfe of Newsweek, went even further by leaving no doubt that Cheney's notes on Wilson's opinion article were actually "an order" directing his staff to push Cheney's loaded questions to friendly journalists...

Following on our earlier report today, covering 100's of electronic voting machines in Philadelphia which failed to start up this morning for Pennsylvania's primary election, we now have a similar report from the other side of the state.

100's of machines in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, also failed to work correctly today. If we're able to remember correctly (since the story doesn't name any voting machine company names), Allegheny County finally settled on voting machines made by ES&S, after they abandoned hopes of going with Diebold when their machines were found to be hackable, and then later found machines from Sequoia Voting Systems --- who they'd planned to use instead --- were discovered to be similarly hackable.

ES&S eventually won the prize, just weeks before today's primary --- we warned about going with a new system with so little time to prepare, but did they listen? --- yet appear to have lost the day for PA voters, according to this report from Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette...

More details on the failures in the Post-Gazette's story. Amongst those details, apparently Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) was locked out of his polling place when an election worker failed to show up to open it this morning.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

While voting machines in the Kentucky primary seem to have worked fine in early reports, some voters got to the polls to find that they had been purged. The SoS apparently is concerned about the hoards of illegal voters from neighboring states who will cross into Kentucky just to vote in their election. While they worry about that dozens of voters in Clay County are complaining about the possibility of their votes being changed on the voting machines. They were told not to confirm their vote on the machine which left the machine to poll workers to change the votes and do the final confirmation. Meanwhile, over 100 Danaher machines in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had problems at start-up. They sat their and spit out their "write-in paper tape" in a steady stream of paper. ...

Pennsylvania is having their primary elections today and, as expected, the train wreck is underway. As reported by Philadelphia Daily News, hundreds of machines (in this case, those made by Danaher Guardian) have failed...

The local ABC affiliate has more details. Amongst them...

More from TheNextMayor.com...

LATE UPDATE: 100's of machines also failed in Pittsburgh across the state in Allegheny County! Details...

The massive security flaw recently revealed in Diebold touch-screen voting machines --- which allows election software and systems to be overwritten with rogue software in minutes, without need of a password --- and which has sent Elections Officials from Pennsylvania to California to Iowa to every state in the union which uses them, sequestering the machines and scrambling for a solution to mitigate the problem, was previously revealed in a 2004 security report commissioned by the state of Maryland, The BRAD BLOG has learned.

The security assessment of Diebold's touch-screen voting systems was completed by RABA Technologies, and presented to the Maryland State Legislature in January 2004. The report, reviewed at the time by both Maryland election officials and officials at Diebold, consisted of "a 'Red Team' exercise to discover vulnerabilities in the actual voting system" prior to the state's March 2004 primary election.

A "Red Team" attack is used by computer security teams to attempt to hack into a computer system or software package. The results of the RABA report in 2004, spelled out specific details of the latest Diebold security problems which have been splashed across the pages of maintream media outlets from coast to coast since last Wednesday.

Maryland was one of the first states to adopt Diebold's paperless touch-screen systems in 2002 and, as previously reported, spent millions of dollars , in an initiative with Diebold at the time, to promote the new electronic voting systems to state voters.

The security problem exists in both Diebold's paperless touch-screen systems, as well as their newer models which include a so-called "voter-verified paper trail."

The BRAD BLOG broke exclusive details of the story originally on Friday before last, several days before the MSM joined the fray...but we're glad that they're all finally paying attention.

Apparently, though Diebold was apprised of the serious security problem back in early 2004, Diebold programmers and company officials appear to have done nothing to fix the flaws which were found as still present in voting systems being sold by the company this year. In March of this year, an independent security analysis of Diebold touch-screen systems deployed in Utah for the first time, confirmed the continuing presence of the same flaw and, additionally, found even more troubling details surrounding the same security vulnerability.

At least one computer scientist and E-voting expert has now described Diebold's delinquency in failing to correct the problem after two years to be "criminal" and meriting complete decertification.

Furthermore, the security vulnerability --- being described by computer security professionals as "the most serious security breach that's ever been discovered in a voting system," and "a major national security risk" --- appears to be yet another apparent violation, by Diebold, of federal Voting System Standards...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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CNN's Barbara Starr is reporting that a court has ordered the Pentagon to release Pentagon surveillance video from 9/11 that shows AA flight #77 hitting the building. Judicial Watch has pursued this video in the courts for several years.

Barbara Starr expects that this video will answer some questions and suspicions that have circulated (largely on the internet) since 9/11. This video release on includes the Pentagon 's surveillance cameras. It does not include other surveillance video that were confiscated from local business after the 9/11 attack.

UPDATE: Judicial Watch plans to post the video on their site sometime after they receive it at 1 pm ET today. Their site is getting hit pretty hard right now. If we can obtain a copy of the video we will re-post it here.

UPDATE #2: MSNBC's Pete Williams is reporting that the newly released video is a series of frames that are similar to some previously released video frames showing a fireball exploding on a exterior wall of the Pentagon. The new video frames show the same fireball exploding from a different angle. It supposedly only shows "the tip of the plane which may not be enough to satisfy the conspiracy theorist," says Williams.

UPDATE #3: CNN is now showing the new video frames. They look very similar to the previously seen "pentagon fireball" video frames. If you weren't convinced by that earlier set of video frames then you will probably not be impressed by this newly released set of video frames. The new video is reported to be a little over a minute long and may have views from several different (but similar) angles. We're trying to get a copy from Judicial Watch for closer inspection...

UPDATE #4 (This one from Brad): I just spoke with Christopher Farrell, director of Investigations and Research at Judicial Watch who says their servers have crashed due to the crush of interest in the video, but that their technical guys are working on it, and they should be back up shortly.

He says this new video, "shows the plane coming in real fast and real low and the nightmare ball of fire that you'd imagine."

Farrell explained that while "some Internet sites had some other version that they posted that is different from the one we've got. This one shows a silver streak very clearly coming in, incredibly low, and slamming into the building. It wasn't like a dive-bomber from above, but coming in very low."

He says that, though it's security camera video, so it's not great, it clearly shows the plane as it crashed into the Pentagon.

Keep checking the Judicial Watch site for when they come back up. Otherwise, we've offered to host the video over here at BRAD BLOG if they continue to have bandwidth and server issues. So feel free to continue checking back here to this item as well.

UPDATE #5 - From MSNBC, here is a screenshot of the frame that reportedly shows the plane followed by a zoomed-in view of the same frame...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Part 1: Maher's Monologue, Panel Discussion

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Playing Time: 10 minutes

Part 2: Panel Continued, New Rules, Maher's Closing Rant

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Playing Time: 12 minutes

Friday's episode of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher was the final live broadcast of the season. The panelist were musician John Legend, national security expert Richard Clarke, and academic Cornell West.

Maher took the opportunity of the season final to focus on slamming President Bush. Maher said that Bush was such an easy target that he had avoided having a Bush theme throughout the season.

Discussion of recent stories about the NSA's domestic programs really took over much of the show. Maher's panelist were outraged at the Bush Administration's abuse of power. Cornell West was highly critical of human and civil rights abuses while Richard Clarke warned of the dangers that happen when an incompetent government employs excessive power.

Due to the length of the video, it has been split into 2 parts. Both parts contain clips from the show that focus on Maher's criticism of Bush and the NSA's domestic spying.