On this coming weekend's Ring of Fire on Air America Radio, attorney/co-host Mike Papantonio can't stop laughing as he reads our headline from last week: "Georgia Supreme Court Rules Unauditable, Unverifiable Elections Are Just Fine".

Though they give me the credit, it was Rady Ananda's story here last week which expertly covered Diebold's wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines receiving the thumbs up for use across the entire state of Georgia, where they've been using them since 2002. That, even though there is no way to determine that any vote ever cast on any of them has ever been recorded accurately as per any voter's intent.

Once Pap stops laughing at our headline, he and David Bender discuss the article noting its even more terrifying "subtext", our previous coverage of the horrifying ES&S takeover over of Diebold's election division.

"Bad as Diebold was, it's now gonna be ES&S, their largest competitor ... ES&S may be the single voting machine company --- this one Goliath that will be unaccountable, unauditable to anybody --- and that's really where we're headed," Bender accurately warns. He advises folks to call Congress at 202-224-3121 in support of Sen. Chuck Schumer's demand for a DoJ antitrust investigation on this matter. We'll also point you to BlackBoxVoting.org who instructs how you can send your own antitrust complaint to the DoJ.

Finally, after Pap details ES&S' legendarily monumental "screw-ups" over the years (his firm was one of those who took on the state of Florida and ES&S after their voting machines simply lost 18,000 votes cast in the 2006 FL-13 U.S. House race, decided for the Republican candidate by just 369 votes), they go on to say some extraordinarily kind things about our work here at The BRAD BLOG.

My thanks to both Pap and David along with the swell Ring Of Fire producers for tipping us off with the exclusive heads-up in advance of this weekend's show --- both for their coverage of this issue, and for those exceptionally kind accolades.

Here's the 4.5 minute conversation [MP3] to air this weekend:

Michael Moore calmly, efficiently and elegantly mopped the floor up with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. Poor, sad, lost, cowardly Sean never saw it coming and never even knew what hit him. Via RAW STORY...

Please see RAW STORY for the whole story, but Bush's former White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer pulled a slick, if sleazy maneuver on CNN's Larry King Live last night while undermining the wingnut "birthers" who believe that Obama is not a U.S. citizen:

Actually, there is "evidence of that being the case," Ari. Plenty of it. Beginning (but not ending) with this years-old independent study [PDF] by a media/academic consortium posted at the "conservative" American Enterprise Institute showing that when all the ballots in the state of Florida were counted --- by any standard (hanging chads, swing chads, pregnant chads, etc.) --- Bush lost and Gore won. By. Every. Conceivable. Counting. Standard. Period.

Other than that, yeah, "for everyone...who's a little lulu on the right, there's about 1.8 who's lulu on the left," as Fleischer misled.

Dishonest Moral Equivalence Accomplished.

The video from the 10/6/09 Larry King Live, also featuring whacky Rep. Michele Bachmann's evasion of whether the "birthers" are crazy or not, is posted below...

We closed yesterday's Green News Report, with a new tune from They Might Be Giants called "Science is Real". The song was written for children, but seems to work as aptly for today's wingnut denialists, such as the embarrassing George Will, who, again, as we noted in the report, used his Washington Post column last week to make a fool of himself by ignoring and/or misunderstanding and/or misusing actual science when making his "scientifically illiterate" case that the world is cooling down, rather than heating up.

As Des noted during our report, which you can listen to here...

'Green News Report' w/ Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen
October 6, 2009

Click to listen (or download)
More info on today's report here...

...using the last ten years of "relatively stable" temperatures, the hottest years on record, and the "absence of significant warming since 1998" as evidence that the earth is cooling, versus the very clear evidence from the last several hundred thousand years showing that it's rapidly warming, is akin to using "one day on the stock market and calling it a trend."

Will's use of quotation marks around the word "scientists" is also rather telling.

To make matters even more embarrassing from him, his column, titled "Cooling Down the Cassandras," also misuses mythology, in that Cassandra was the prophetess who was actually always correct in sounding her alarms in hopes of avoiding disaster, but was never believed by those in power until it was too late.

Anyway, while I'm working a deadline in the background, I thought you guys might appreciate the light-hearted video for the awesome They Might Be Giants tune as a short respite from our heavy-ish coverage of late. Hopefully your kids will appreciate it. And perhaps even the wingnuts who chance across The BRAD BLOG today might end up learning something they should have picked up in 2nd grade...

An 18-year Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Manager for the FBI has called for a Special Counsel to be appointed to investigate the allegations of FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. John M. Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, made his comments during an audio interview released late last week with radio journalist Peter B. Collins.

He also offered a detailed insider's look at the concerns among high-level officials inside the Bureau as Edmonds' disturbing allegations began coming to light back in 2002, before they would be quashed for seven long years by the Bush Administration's unprecedented use of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege" to gag her.

Earlier last week, following the publication of a remarkable American Conservative magazine cover story interview with Edmonds --- detailing a broad bribery, blackmail, and espionage conspiracy said to have been carried out between current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials and covert operatives from Turkey and Israel, resulting in the theft and sale of nuclear weapons technology on the foreign black market --- Cole had been quoted by the magazine confirming one of Edmonds' key allegations.

"I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of" Marc Grossman, he said in response to the AmCon article/interview. Grossman had served as the third-highest ranking official in the Bush State Department and was alleged by Edmonds in the interview, and in a sworn, video-taped deposition a month earlier, to have been the U.S. ringleader for a massive Turkish espionage scandal reaching through the halls of power and into top-secret nuclear facilities around the country to the benefit of allies and enemies alike. Cole said that the FBI's counterintelligence probe "ultimately was buried and covered up," and that he believes it is "long past time" for an investigation of the case to "bring about accountability."

In his subsequent interview with Collins last week (audio and text excerpts posted below) Cole elaborated on those comments in much greater detail, noting that Edmonds has been "one hundred percent right on the money, on the mark" and confirming the existence of an "ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States" through various illegal activities.

"Yes, I can confirm that," Cole told Collins, "That's true."

The FBI veteran executive also offered an insider's account of the panic that ensued inside the highest echelons of the bureau following Edmonds' first disclosure of information in 2002, recounting how an executive assistant director admitted to him at the time, just after the story first broke, "Well, all I know is that everything that Sibel is stating is true. I read her file. Everything she stated is, in fact, accurate."

Cole further describes how the concerns about Edmonds ultimately led to the Bush Administration's two-time use of the Draconian "State Secrets Privilege" in hopes of keeping her extraordinary information from becoming public. "Everybody at headquarters level at the bureau knew that what she was saying was extremely accurate."

"I know they didn't want her to go out and speak about it at all," Cole revealed, "and I know they were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet, because they didn't want Sibel to come out."

He also offered information which directly counters one of the criticisms of Edmonds' allegations as frequently offered by skeptics. Namely, that as a short time FBI contract translator --- even though she was tasked to review some seven years of counterintelligence wiretaps made from 1996 to 2002 --- she couldn't have had enough understanding of the full scope of the investigations to understand what was really going on.

"The thing is," Cole explained to Collins, "the position that Sibel was in, she had access to extremely sensitive information. The translators have access to some of the most sensitive information that we receive."

He detailed how first-hand information goes first from the translators to the investigators who then act on it, as some of the most important information collected by FBI language specialists could have "implications that may affect even the White House, or policy."

"So what I'm saying is, I know she had access to some very sensitive stuff, and I could see why the Bureau would squirm over her coming out and speaking about some of the things that were going on."

The interview concluded with Cole's reiteration of both his confidence in Edmonds' credibility, and his call for accountability.

"I would love to see, especially with the allegations that Sibel has come out with, her allegations --- which I believe are in fact true, I have no reason to doubt what she's saying --- I would love to see somebody take that, a Special Counsel or whatever, some group of people that you could trust, have them investigate those allegations and have people's feet held to the fire. Have them be held accountable for their actions --- and prosecuted if they've done wrong."

"You know, no one's above the law, and no one should be above the law," he added, along with one more chilling thought: "You know, it really irritates me that people are getting away with murder, in some cases. They should not be allowed to get away with that. There needs to be accountability. And that's what I'd love to see."

The complete audio, and key text excerpts from Collins' interview with Cole follow below...

In advance of tomorrow's related story [Update: That story now posted here], I thought you might appreciate a quick look at the following if you've never seen it before. Diane Sawyer narrates the story of FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds as she was awarded the 2006 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.

In the bargain, it's also worth remembering that Sawyer herself is at least aware of Edmonds, who she is, and some of what she's had to go through, further begging the question of why ABC News has failed to even note --- much less investigate and/or cover --- the recent revelations of bribery and blackmail of current and former U.S. Congressmembers and high-ranking State and Defense Department officials, and the theft and sale of nuclear secrets by agents of Turkey and Israel, as detailed in her sworn deposition in August, and remarkable AmCon cover-story interview which followed it late last month...

Mind you, I'm unfamiliar with any actual felonies that ACORN has actually committed. But Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) is proposing that corporations found guilty of having committed a felony be ineligible for government contracts for 5 years and that corporate felons should be disallowed from making political donations for the same amount of time.

Sounds good to me. After all, both House of Congress idiotically voted overwhelmingly to deprive ACORN --- again, a community organization that committed no crime, and that comprises, in fact, American heroes --- from receiving federal funding (via a likely unconstitutional bill, btw). So shouldn't a similar measure be taken to protect the American tax-payer from corporations that have actually been found guilty of things like fraud, murder, prostitution, etc? Corporations that receive more money from American tax-payers in a day than ACORN has in its lifetime? Corporations like Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, Halliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, and hundreds of others?

McCollum makes the case for the "Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation (A.C.O.R.N.)" Act [PDF] in an interview with Mike McIintee of The UpTake:

And, btw, for those under the delusion that ACORN employees committed crimes in those rightwing "sting" videos propagandized by Fox "News" and the other non-wingnut outlets who fell for it, think again. (The author of that dKos piece deserves a huge Project Censored award as far as I'm concerned!)

A New York judge rules the CIA can torture, destroy the video tape evidence of it whenever they want, and there's nothing any American citizen can do about it, apparently. Are we now the USSA?

The Schmidt v. Krikorian hearing is continuing today before the Ohio Election Commission. This is the case which resulted in FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' stunning sworn deposition in early August, and in "high drama" on the first day of proceedings early last month.

I'll be off the grid for much of today, so allow me to refer to today's live tweeting by Cincinnati Enquirer's Jon Craig, and to Geoffrey "Ohiobama" Sea's live blogging over at Daily Kos. Both come straight from the courtroom as the, apparently equally contentious, second day continues.

There was discussion, after the first day ended last month, of Edmonds testifying in person; she is not currently scheduled to do so, though Krikorian says her deposition transcript and video will be submitted nonetheless. And as Craig's tweets suggest, this thing may go to a third day, in any case.

More later as I'm able to get back and pay attention. For more background on the case for now, see the stories in our Jean Schmidt category...

UPDATE 10/2/09: Here's an excellent, if Armenian-leaning summary/report on the case by Peter Musurlian of Horizon TV, following the September 3rd hearing (in advance of the second day continuation yesterday), including some shoving in the elevator outside the hearing room, for which the filmmaker is said to be considering a lawsuit, a "screw you" comment from Schmidt's Chief of Staff, Barry Bennet, and some forgetful testimony from Schmidt who had twice been found in "reckless disregard for the truth" by the same commission, for having lied about receiving a second college degree:

FURTHER UPDATE 10/2/09: The decisions of the Ohio Election commission are now in, including the decision to allow portions of Edmonds' sworn deposition to be submitted into evidence in the hearing. These are the final updates from Sea's live blogging at dKos yesterday from within the hearing room (his earlier updates are also well worth the read, as it sounds like it was quite a day in that room!)...

[Now updated with audio archives at bottom of article.]

I'll be guest hosting the The Mike Malloy Show LIVE from Los Angeles tonight as Mike is doing a personal appearance in San Francisco.

Once again, I'll be 'Bradcasting' from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT) and hope you'll tune in! We'll have our swell new, handy-dandy chat room up and operating during the show, so jump into the conversation there as well! (It'll be open just before show time, see down below.)

Tonight's guests...

• PHILIP GIRALDI, former CIA officer and author of American Conservative's explosive new cover story interview with FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, detailing allegations of bribery, blackmail, theft of nuclear weapons technology by high-ranking U.S. officials and the Turkish and Israeli governments.
• LORRAINE MINNITE, Barnard College asst. professor and author the landmark report, "The Politics of Voter Fraud," soon to be expanded into a book from Cornell University Press early next year, on the latest GOP/media ACORN smears, lies and madness. (See Brad at the UK Guardian and/or Rachel Maddow's recent smashing reports here, here and here, for an idea.)
• EMILY LEVY of VelvetRevolution.us' on their new "DIEBOLD: RETURN OUR MONEY!" campaign, demanding the return of some $100 million dollars from the company that knowingly sold e-voting systems to the state of CA (and many other states) even though they failed to comply with federal voting system standards.
• PETER PHILLIPS & MICKEY HUFF, co-editors of Project Censored's new Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09 on the most important stories you haven't heard or read about in the corporate media.
• Plus: Brad rants (no doubt), your calls at 877-520-1150, and whatever else may come up along the way...

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by "Agent 99"! Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE AND AUDIO ARCHIVES: Three "hours" (actually, about 38 minutes without commercials) that flew by. Give the archives below a listen, and see if you don't agree. My thanks to Ben Burch from WhiteRose Society! The archive of tonight's Chat Room discussion from during the show, is also posted below. Enjoy 'em all and then do someting about it!...

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow continued her series last night, on the "purely political smear campaign" which ACORN has faced since registering nearly 2 million legal voters over the last decade. In the third installment of her continuing series, she focused on the ACORN smears over non-existent "voter fraud," which were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney scandal.

Before being joined by former Republican U.S. Attorney from New Mexico David Iglesias --- fired by the Bush White House because he refused to bring fraudulent voter fraud cases against Democrats, as we covered in exclusive detail in March of 2007 --- Maddow notes accurately: "No accusation has ever been substantiated that anyone ever registered by ACORN ever voted fraudulently."

She added astutely: "The Bush White House viewed voter fraud as the mother of all wedge issues. It's paying its dividends today, and remarkably, Democrats are playing right along with it."...

Maddow's excellent previous reports in this series are here:

Thursday: The truth about the extraordinary GOP lies and media failure concerning ACORN.
Friday: The hypocrisy (and unconstitutionality) of defunding ACORN while groups like Halliburton and Blackwater, which committed actual crimes, like murder and real fraud, still receive more federal funding in a day than ACORN has in its lifetime.

This is all much like watching a broadcast news version replay of the last 5 years here at The BRAD BLOG. And we're lovin' it. Thank you again, Rachel! Please keep it up! As "Annie" said in It's a Wonderful Life: "'Bout time one of you lunkheads said it!"

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, the author of American Conservative magazine's explosive cover story interview with FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds finds her to be "very credible," even though "as a former intelligence officer," he says, he's "normally suspicious of these kinds of stories."

Giraldi was a guest on the Thom Hartmann Program today, as guest hosted by Peter B. Collins. In the 13 minute segment, he discussed a number of aspects of Edmonds' disturbing allegations with Collins, including yesterday's confirmation by a long-time FBI veteran of a key element in her claims, which include bribery, blackmail, and the theft of nuclear secrets as aided and abetted by high-ranking U.S. officials.

Giraldi, a long-time counterterrorism specialist with the CIA, commented on the confirmation by 18-year FBI counterintelligence vet John Cole, who, in a published claim yesterday, acknowledged the existence of a "decade-long investigation" targeting the former third-highest ranking official in the Bush State Department, Marc Grossman, as Edmonds has long maintained. Citing Cole's first-hand experience with the espionage investigations in question, Giraldi told Collins during the interview:

Listen online below, or download the MP3...

NOTE: I'll be sitting in to guest host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show again tomorrow night (Wednesday), and have also scheduled Giraldi as a guest. We'll have him on for a full hour at the beginning of the show (live at 6p PT, 9p ET) and will invite your calls and questions for him at 877-520-1150.

UPDATE 10/1/09: Here's my interview with Giraldi on the Malloy Show last Wednesday (9/30/09). With commercials removed, the "hour" is appx. 38 minutes.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

[UPDATE 10/5/09: Cole has now greatly expanded on his confirmation of Edmonds' credibility and is calling for a 'Special Counsel' investigation, prosecution. Full story here...]

George W. Bush's third-highest ranking State Department official, Marc Grossman, who became the Under Secretary of State after previously serving as Ambassador to Turkey, was targeted as part of a "decade-long investigation" by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the bureau's Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.

For still-unknown reasons, the investigation, which also involved a multitude of cases involving Israeli espionage, was ultimately "buried and covered up," according to the official.

The comment from the former FBI official John M. Cole, in response to recent, stunning disclosures made by former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, helps to shore up a key aspect of her allegations. Cole is now calling for an investigation to help "bring about accountability" in the matter.

Edmonds' allegations of bribery, blackmail, and infiltration by foreign agents at the highest levels of the U.S. government were recently detailed in a remarkable cover story interview, as published last week by the American Conservative magazine.

"I read the recent cover story by The American Conservative magazine. I applaud their courage in publishing this significant interview," Cole says in his public response, as posted today at the AmCon website by interviewer and former CIA agent Philip Giraldi.

Cole then went on to verify his knowledge of the espionage investigation which, he says, included Grossman. Edmonds has long alleged he had been a key target in the agency's counterintelligence probe of the Turkish lobby and their relationship to current and former members of Congress and high-ranking officials in the Bush State and Defense Departments.

Cole also charges, in his brief comment, that the investigation was ultimately quashed by still-unnamed officials.

"I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of the High-level State Department Official named in this article, Marc Grossman, which ultimately was buried and covered up," Cole notes, adding his call to re-open the matter. "It is long past time to investigate this case and bring about accountability."...

Following on Rachel Maddow's tremendous coverage last Thursday of the GOP's years-long witch-hunt of ACORN, and the media's abysmal job at telling the truth about the lies used to smear the community organization, the MSNBC journalist calls it an "outrage" and kept her promise of following up with another episode on Friday. The video is below.

We welcome her coverage of so much of what we have been reporting, sometimes almost completely alone, for years, and as further detailed now by a new academic study titled "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong."

Maddow continued her long-overdue exposé, by examining the "Defund ACORN Act of 2009," which recently passed both houses of Congress by large margins, after sting videos showing low-level ACORN employees behaving stupidly (but breaking no laws) were created and posted by rightwing operatives. As she notes, the Congressional bill appears to be both unconstitutional, and incredibly hypocritical, given that other, still-federally funded organizations --- such as Halliburton, Blackwater, and many, many more --- often receive far more federal funding in a single day than ACORN has received during the organization's entire lifetime.

Furthermore, those other organizations, which still receive billions from the U.S. government, were actually found to have committed actual crimes, such as millions of dollars worth of fraud, have been charged with murder and the deaths of U.S. troops, and even involve child prostitution and sex slavery!

It's odd that Fox "News," Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, et al. (including the bulk of the non-wingnut media!) have yet to point these matters out, isn't it? So thanks to Maddow, again, for doing so, along with credit to both Joe Conason, who pointed out some of this hypocrisy recently at Salon and, yes, ourselves, who similarly opined at the UK's Guardian.

Be sure to see her must-watch Thursday report back here. Her Friday report follows below, along with our repeated "thank you" to Rachel, and offer to help on any number of still-unreported points in the continuing GOP witch-hunt that both the media and Democrats have embarrassingly fallen for, and about which we have been reporting for years...

UPDATE 9/29/09: The third report in Maddow's must-see series is now posted here...

The Chicago News Bench blog cornered Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) at a Health Care Townhall event over the weekend, to ask her about former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' allegation, as published by American Conservative magazine last week, that she had become involved in a secretly-videotaped lesbian affair with a Turkish agent.

In the brief video, Schakowsky is asked directly about the affair, and denies the allegations as "total fantasy" and "totally made up."

As reported exclusively by The BRAD BLOG last Tuesday, Schakowsky's Communications Director Trevor Kincaid issued a formal statement on her behalf, following the AmCon cover story interview with Edmonds, using similar language. "A simple review of the facts would lead any responsible person to conclude that there is not a shred of truth to any aspect of this story," Kincaid wrote, adding "not one of the events in this fantastic tale ever took place."

Edmonds replied in kind, offering direct questions to the Congresswoman, and a challenge to take a polygraph test in regard to the matter, if she would do the same. Today, while speaking to The BRAD BLOG, Edmonds upped the ante by challenging her to sue her for libel, if she denies the charges, but refuses to hold Congressional hearings as Edmonds also invited her to do last week...