The Article V 100: An Untitled DocumentaryJohn De Herrera
OpEdNews.com
December 23, 2006
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_john_de__061223_the_article_v_100_3a_a.htm Some weeks back I left work early to hear Scott Ritter at a book-signing. Remember Scott Ritter? Remember that night at Cal-Tech in Pasadena? The eve of war? Everyone was incredulous, the Bush Administration was going to invade Iraq while the previous months the world watched inspectors on the ground, and Richard Perle and the Neocons scared everyone into the idea that we better take care of business or wake up to a mushroom cloud.
I remember it was packed that night, they put speakers outside the auditorium and hundreds of us stood and sat around the quad and listened to Scott tell us there were no WMDs in Iraq. Now he's got another book out about Iran. Besides wanting to hear what he was going to say about the new book, I had a question for him.
Scott Ritter is one of those people you're happy to be around. A gentle giant who is intelligent, has a sense of humor, and actually some artistic talent too. A tradition at the that little bookstore there on the coast in California is to have the author sign an album and draw a picture of themselves next to their comments. He drew a decent picture of himself.
I had seen him on C-SPAN in his staged appearance with Seymor Hersh before the New York Society for Ethics. What struck me peculiar was a moment in the broadcast where Ritter was responding to Hersh, and he was impassioned, and he said what the U.S. ought to be doing is talking with the Ayatollah and the main council of clerics. That Ahmadinejad was somehow getting a bunch of media coverage and making the situation a mess. Ritter said we ought to be dealing with the Iranians who actually have a say in the matter, and that in fact those folks had already attempted to establish diplomatic ties with the Bush Administration but had been rebuffed.
What happened at that moment in the interview was interesting. It was how Hersh told Scott to back up in that "wait-a-minute buddy" kind of way saying that Ahmadinejad was dangerous. Hersh, in what was an admonishment, told Ritter that we must pay attention to what Ahmadinejad says because much of the Arab world was behind him.
By the time I got down to the book signing I was wondering what Scott's opinion about the electoral system was, and what he thought about reports of e-voting and the danger of it. He may be an expert on matters concerning fissile nuclear materials, but he's also an American so I wanted to hear what he thought. And being a former Marine, someone who has taken an oath, he understands well the concept of protecting the country from enemies foreign or domestic. Which is what e-voting and the issue of source code is, it is a crucible as to whether or not this generation of Americans is going to lose the vote to special interests forevermore. There is a very simple solution to the political catastrophe caused when the country was flooded with $3.8 billion worth of corporate voting machines: the 28th Amendment. The work of securing the vote in the age of e-voting requires the political weight of an amendment to the Constitution. No amount of legislation coming out of a corrupted institution is going to create the effects required. Representative Rush Holt and Senator Brack Obama are currently set to intorduce legislation in the next Congress which will "stay the course" and waste millions on the system HAVA brought about. For things as they are now, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is going to secure the vote.
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