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Host: Well joining us again is Wayne Madsen. Wayne, welcome again to the Sunday Monitor.
Madsen: Hi, good to be with you.
Host: Wayne, for people who haven't listened to the show regularly, appears fairly frequently on this show and predominantly because he has such shocking information in many cases, which has often turned out to be quite accurate and one of those stories that you're working on right now, Wayne, and I guess we should give people a thumbnail sketch of what the story is in case they weren't listening last week. Can you just give us a quick rundown of how it all started and what you're looking at?
Madsen: Well, there was information floating around various, uhm, what I would have to say are informed circles in Houston and elsewhere that the money that was used to pay for technicians and programmers to rig this election came through a circuitous route that's been long connected to Bush family activities going back to the days of BCCI, Iran-Contra and other nefarious exploits and that this circuitous network and this trage of money that's been used in the past, a trage of money that's been associated with the Saudis, was used once again to pay people to come up with the software, especially that which was used on touchscreen voting machines, to fix this election... basically to cause votes to switch from one candidate to another, not for a large margin but just enough votes to, for the Republican candidates to squeek by. And certainly one of the things I have discovered within the last week that the 2004 election was not the only election where this rigged software was used. It was used as early as the 2000 election, which Al Gore as we know lost by a very narrow margin.
Host: Now, these are obviously very serious allegations, what kind of proof do you have? Last week you mentioned the 29 million dollar check. What's happened with that? What do you know about it?
Madsen: Yeah, it turns out that the 29 million dollar check, although a valuable clue, was a fake, but it looks like the people who released the check did so as a way to say hey look here, don't look at the check, look who's behind it, look around it, follow the money that these people have been involved with passing through various offshore entities in the past...
Host: So you think it was a clue to help you rather than to hinder you?
Madsen: I believe the intention might have been to hinder because the check obviously represents a scam involving Nigerian scammers but also involves individuals who apparently who have been tied and some documents that I've received from the U.S. district court here in Washington, D.C., uh, the person who obviously was involved in this bogus check has had an absolute verified past history with the CIA because the CIA is claiming that two documents he requested per a Freedom of Information Act request cannot be released because of national security grounds.
Host: So if all this stuff is indeed true that there was software that's being used to rig the election, how are we ever going to get this information out and do you see any prospect of this being accepted as actually having happened at some point? I mean it sounds at this stage and, you know me so you know I'm not accusing you of anything...
Madsen: Right...
Host: ...but people on the right and people who want to move on, so called, from democracy in a sense, that the vote didn't matter anymore and we should be over it, will say that this sounds like a conspiracy theory and that you don't have any proof. Where do you take this from here and how do you answer those allegations?
Madsen: Well, I'm going to get this article out, I've got help from researchers here in Washington, on the net, on the web, people, especially with the Democratic Underground have been very good in helping to follow leads and get clues... I'm going to try to get this article sent out tonight, probably won't get posted until the morning... Look, as far as proof, I've got a notarized affidavit from one of the programmers that was involved in rigging the software... It took place... the genesis for this was not this year, last year, it was in 1999 in Florida involving a U.S. government contracter with contracts with NASA. The individual in question has come forward... and I think people will hear more about what he has to say in the coming week because there's going to be a forum sponsored Michigan congressman John Conyers on Wednesday and I think a lot of people will hear what the background for this story is if they watch C-SPAN.
Host: Now, you mentioned Democratic Underground and I wanted to just give people a quick link, something that I saw on there that was very interesting, if you go to safevoting.org you can download a video clip of actually something that took place in Texas, I believe, and it was a Diebold software meeting where they were trying to certify a machine and they are on tape saying it's got problems and it doesn't count and the tally doesn't match the vote and we'll certify it anyway because we've done it in the past so it's a very interesting video clip. It's safevoting.org. Wayne, you mentioned a signed affidavit, what motivates a person like that to publically express these things? Is it sour grapes at not being paid or what happened?
Madsen: No, it wasn't sour grapes, the person obviously was under the impression when he was first asked to create a program that it was going to be used to prevent fraud using touchscreen machines but he didn't realize it had an entirely opposite purpose. It's not that the person has been trying to keep this secret. I have to blame the news media. The individual... this results from a huge whistleblower case in Florida involving a Florida... a contracter for the Florida Department of Transportation... we... one of the things that will be coming out in the article is we have information that pretty much proves that the chief investigator for the Florida Department of Transportation that was looking into this company, this contractor and its involvement in creating vote rigging software, they say he committed suicide back on July 1st, 2003, last year, but we have evidence to show that it was not suicide, that likely he was murdered because he was going places where a lot of people were getting nervous.
Host: Well, that partially answers my next question, which was going to be, something like this would have to involve a serious number of people keeping quiet and how do you keep a large number of people quiet when this kind of potential vote rigging is going on and I guess you already partly answered that. Do you have any more thoughts on the number of people who would have to be involved in this to make it work and making sure that they all stay quiet?
Madsen: Yeah, of course it's like every other past scandal, like Iran-Contra, and the BCCI scandal... you know, small groups of people know so much about their particular area, you know, the part they play, uh, very few people have the big picture and that's one of the things that's been really difficult in following this story with bogus checks and false leads and what one former Department of Justice prosecutor told me is typical of organized criminal syndicates and covert activities, that these feints, as he called them, are put up, they run parallel to the actual movement of money and it's used to, of course, throw government investigators off the track and that's why this stuff is done using these offshore accounts and these people who are, you know, con men, you know the CIA has used in the past many con men and some people would suggest that the current director of the CIA is one of them.
Host: Well, yeah, well, I don't even know what to say about that. I was going to ask you something about the locking down of precincts. In the first article you wrote... our previous guest, actually the first guest we had was talking about the media being kept out of various places where they were doing counts, and that that was a serious red flag for him... you wrote about locking down of precincts where votes were being tallied, how many of those can be verified, how many precincts were locked down?
Madsen: Well, apparently there was the one report out of Warren County, Ohio but now there's reports from around the country that similar things took place, I believe New Mexico, North Carolina, Florida, places in Texas and southern California similar things happened.
Host: Do you have any suggested places where people could look where they could find out where that happened?
Second Host: Actually, I just found out, Wayne, that in Harris County, at the big tabulation place on the evening of the election, there was a power outage. It was at Reliant Center and it was Reliant Company's electricity that went out for several hours and people were told to go home.
Host: Harris County is here in Texas for those listening on the web and I know some do so that's a local interest story for us. Do you have any suggested places where people can get more information on those things because I've had some questions about that, you know, the one case in Ohio is fairly well known but you're saying it was happening elsewhere as well...
Madsen: I think anybody who would look at Riverside County, California may find some irregularites there... why Californi? Well everybody know that was going to go for John Kerry but we saw an increase in Bush's vote in California, which is rather surprising compared to what he got in the 2000 election. And there's some thought that in Texas and California , very populous states of course, that the votes were padded to give Bush this some three and a half million vote, popular vote margin, which would be obviously part of the scam to make it look like he had a runaway victory but it looks very apparent that because of the problems with the software now we have evidence that this vote switching program that was designed to suppress Democratic vote... we have the name of the then Speaker of the House of the Flordia House of Representatives that he personally requested that this work be done because he was a chief lobbyist and general counsel for the firm that was a NASA contractor in the state of Florida, the contractor that performed the development of the software, current Republican Congressman Tom Feeney. So, this isn't a case of having dead people vote in Chicago any longer, this was a huge criminal enterprise, it affected a number of elections, it affected a number of candidates who won the election but the results showed that they lost... everyone from Gray Davis in California to Max Cleland in Georgia, possibly Janet Reno in her unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic candidate for Governor of Florida. The evidence is there and I think if we had an FBI we could rely on this is a criminal investigation having to do with money laundering, having to do with influence peddling, with bribery and it's no longer just vote fraud, this is a criminal investigation and should be treated as one.
Second Host: Wayne, looking back at some of the scandals that we've been through in the last few years, like Enron, Abu Ghraib and so on, there's a tendency the moment the light shines, for all the mice to run away and leave one in the middle holding the bag, like Abu Ghraib, you know, it was supposedly, you know, half a dozen bad apples... what's to prevent that from happening here, where some low person or middle person gets stuck holding the bag?
Madsen: Well, I mean, I'm confident that the people that we know of in Florida who have already gone on record as whistleblowers, unfortunately one person who was on to this died last year under some very mysterious circumstances... my hope is that, you know, this will stick where it needs to stick and obviously what happened in Florida with the development of the software was fully known to Jeb Bush, was fully know to the Speaker of the House at the time, Tom Feeney, who, at the same time he was Speaker of the House of Representatives in Florida, was a registered lobbyist for this company, Yang Enterprises in Oveido, Florida, which has a lot of contracts with the Kennedy Space Center... interestingly enough, Feeney's wife is an engineer at the Kennedy Space Center... the money that I talked about with Five Star Trust, apparently from all indications they may have used NASA contract vehicles to get the money to the software developers to create the software program and, of course, Five Star was associated with Houston and we know that the Johnson Space Center has contractors there, and the name Sean OKeefe, the NASA administrator has come up very prominent in this scandal as well.
Host: Well, on that note, Wayne, I'm going to have to leave it there but thanks again for joining us and certainly keep me updated on the story and we'll see where it goes.
Madsen: It's a breaking story as I speak.
Host: It keeps on breaking and we'll see where it goes from here. Thanks a lot again for joining us.
Second Host: www.onlinejournal.com is where you can find Wayne's stories.
Host: Yeah, there should be another one up there tomorrow morning I believe. That's all the time we have for the show tonight. Our guests were Cliff Arnebeck, James Galbraith and Wayne Madsen.
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