Wampum

Find the Common Element

Remember those tests in which you were given a list of several things and were asked to find the common element among them? Let’s try a version of that test. Below are three items. What is the common element?

Item 1

Bev Harris is the proprietor of Black Box Voting. She has done yeoman’s work in exposing the faults in Diebold electronic voting systems.

Diebold’s chief executive, Walden O’Dell wrote a fundraising letter on behalf of President Bush stating that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Bev Harris writes (no permanent links available; it is the April 29 entry) that the Secret Service, under the auspices of the Patriot Act, is hassling her. The Secret Service is threatening to haul her before a Grand Jury and seize her computer in order to gather information about people opposed to electronic voting.

Item 2

According to this Associated Press report (link via Tom Tomorrow) the Treasury Department seems more concerned about Fidel Castro than Osama bin Laden:

The Treasury Department agency (the Office of Foreign Asset Control) entrusted with blocking the financial resources of terrorists has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden)'s and Saddam Hussein's money, documents show…

Sen. Max Baucus, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, requested the figures, which showed that at the end of 2003, OFAC had 21 full-time agents working Cuba violations and just four full-time workers hunting bin Laden's and Saddam's riches…

"This is really astounding," (Senator Byron) Dorgan said. "I hope somebody in the administration will soon come to his or her senses and start directing our resources where they are needed. Politics is clearly diverting precious time, money and manpower away from the war on terrorism here."

The virulently anti-Castro Cuban-American vote in Florida is crucial to the President’s electoral chances in Florida. Florida, in turn, is crucial to the President’s efforts to win reelection.

On a recent trip to Florida, Treasury Secretary John Snow touted the work of the Office of Foreign Asset Control that has been devoting resources to policing the Cuban embargo instead of looking for terrorists’ financial assets. As the Miami Herald reported:

Treasury Secretary John Snow proudly trotted out the latest statistics on the crackdown during a visit to Miami in February. He said that 264 cases had been opened by Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control, the agency that licenses travel to Cuba.

Item 3
The law has long prohibited the provision of material support to terrorist organizations. President Bush has remarked as follows:

if you harbored a terrorist, if you fed a terrorist, if you hid a terrorist, you're just as guilty as a terrorist…

Among the groups listed by the State Department as terrorist organizations are two from the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Echo Bay Mines, until it morphed into Kindross Gold, was a gold mining company with interests in the Philippines. The Sierra Club’s Marilyn Berlin Snell has carefully documented that Echo Bay provided in excess of $1.7 million in material support (mostly cash) to terrorist groups in the Philippines.

According to Snell, the information and documentation of Echo Bay’s payments to terrorist groups have been offered or provided to the authorities. Snell also reports:

According to Jeffrey Breinholt, coordinator of the Terrorism Financing Task Force at the Department of Justice, as of the end of February 2004, 57 individuals had been charged with crimes involving material support for terrorist organizations. ("Material support," or "providing something of value" to terrorists has been a crime since 1994, but its definition was broadened in 1996 and again under the PATRIOT Act.)

No prosecution of Echo Bay or its officers and employees for providing material support to terrorists organizations has been instituted.

An Open Secrets search reveals that mining companies have given almost $12 million to Republicans from the 2000 election cycle to the present and that about 85% of its contributions have been to Republicans.

What is the common element among those three items?

Posted by Dwight Meredith at May 2, 2004 01:34 PM | TrackBack