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Palast:	All right! So, let's talk about the regime. 
Scoop:	Yeah. First of all, you've said that you're bringing out another version of the book, so that's coming out. 
Palast:	Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Yeah, it'll be a new edition of Armed Madhouse, out on Tuesday. Expanded. Because the evil has expanded, I've had to expand the book. I'm updating everything and adding a couple more chapters, including one called Busted, which is about how I was charged with violating anti-terrorism laws by the Department of Homeland Security while I was investigating what George Bush did to the City of New Orleans, which they didn't particularly like. 
And then another chapter called The Theft of 2008 about how the US elections are already fixed. I'm always writing about after the fact--I figured I'd do this one in advance. 
Scoop:	There's some mention of voter fraud and Karl Rove in the US Attorneys controversy, which... 
Palast:	Oh, yeah! Actually, I'm kind of in the middle of that one. I'm working with John Congers, the chairman. What's happened is, when they went through Karl Rove's emails and made them public, there was a couple of gloating emails, one just dated this past February, in which Rove and his minions are gloating that the US media does not pick up the investigations of "that British reporter, Greg Palast." And as you can tell from my accent, I may report from the BBC out of London, but I'm simply an American in exile trying to report my news. 
And he's right. The US media doesn't pick up my stuff. And Rove's people even attached an excerpt from Armed Madhouse, like, "Ha, ha! This is not what they're reading and not what they're seeing in America." In a way, he's right. It's pretty much hidden. 
Scoop:	Which bit in particular were they referring to? 
Palast:	They were referring to... what they were most focused and concerned about, frankly, was that I had obtained emails from Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's right-hand hit man-- actually, dozens of emails--in which he was operating a scheme to challenge the rights of hundreds of thousands of black Americans to vote, of African Americans to vote. What he was doing... this is pretty creepy. In the US, you register to vote in advance. You can't vote unless you've pre-registered, and what he was doing is he was sending letters to voters, to soldiers who were registered out of their home addresses, and if they were sent to Baghdad, the letters would be returned as undeliverable, and they would use that as evidence that the voter was committing voter fraud and knock out their vote. 
So, in other words, the way that the US system works, if someone challenges your vote and you're not there cos you're in Fallujah or somewhere, you don't know your vote's being challenged. The Republicans--I mean, I don't think the planet knows about this, and I can tell you that Americans don't know about this--the Republicans challenged three million voters--three million--in the last election, the Kerry-Bush race. And 1.1 million of those votes were thrown out, mostly because people had no idea that they'd been challenged. They had no idea that they were losing their vote. 
They targeted soldiers. Mission Accomplished! Mr Bush. 
Scoop:	And yet, in that election we saw an inordinate, a huge turnout and a massive growth in the vote. Did you have any suspicions about that? 
Palast:	Oh, more than suspicions; I did the calculations, and therefore ... one of the chapters of Armed Madhouse is Kerry Won, Now Get Over It. It was about how... there's no question. In the US, the presidency's determined by the winners of each state. It's a winner-take-all in each state and those Electoral votes are added up. There's no question that John Kerry not only won Ohio, which technically went to George Bush, but he won the state of New Mexico, he won the state of Iowa, probably Nevada and a couple of others. Unquestionably. If you counted all the votes. What happened was that all these votes were just thrown in the garbage. In the case of places like Ohio. 
One thing I've added in the new edition of Armed Madhouse is records from the state of Ohio where someone had literally crossed out--you'll see the actual cross-outs on these documents--where they'd crossed out and removed voting machines from African American neighborhoods. That's why you had these massive lines. They deliberately removed machines so that there'd be gigantic back-up lines. Seven- and eight-hour waits to vote if you were in a minority neighborhood, but if you were in a white suburban neighborhood, you walked right in and voted. That was just one of the games that they played. 
Massive challenges. Guys with little Blackberries challenging voters as they came up. No particular reason, but basically Democrats are black and they're pretty much defenseless. And, of course, the US media doesn't cover this because the US media doesn't cover anything that involves black people or poor people, in particular. And they're not going to do anything that involves challenging, suggesting that the American presidency was decided by an electoral coup d'etat. 
Scoop:	What does all this tell us about the state of American democracy? Tim Griffin, I think, was subsequently appointed as the US Attorney for Arkansas, wasn't he? 
Palast:	That's right. Tim Griffin, the guy who ran the purge operation! 
You have to understand, it's against the law to target black voters. I was working, I've been working with an elections attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr--son of the murdered Attorney General--and he was saying, "You know, this is a crime. This is a go-to-jail crime in America." You cannot target black voters en masse to take away their votes. This is what the Martin Luther King laws were all about. The Voting Rights Act of '65 passed after King was gunned down. You can't do this. So now you actually have a perpetrator--a criminal--as a prosecutor. 
US Attorney means he's the chief prosecutor. So you actually have the guy who should be prosecuted being the prosecutor. That's the brilliance of vote theft. It is the perfect crime, because if you win you become the judge and you become the prosecutor and you control the whole system. You can't be prosecuted. You're prosecution-immune. You've won. You steal the election, but you also steal the system of voter enforcement. 
Scoop:	Increasingly we seem to have seen, in terms of this US Attorneys scandal, facts emerging that a lot of the pressure on these US Attorneys and the reasons for their dismissal seems to have been related to their unwillingness to pursue voter fraud. 
Palast:	Yes. Well, there is massive vote fraud in the United States, but it's committed by the parties and the politicians, not by the voters. No-one's willing to go to jail just to cast a vote for a school board or even for president. I mean, just one little vote. You do go to prison for that. And there were 120 million people cast votes for president, and I'm trying to find 120 that committed fraud. And we can't. 
But that was driving Karl Rove crazy, because he needed to find... in other words, to cover up their own crimes, they wanted to blame the voters, not the vote manipulators like the people out of the Rove office doing all this mass challenging. They wanted to create a hysteria which would allow them to change the voting laws--which would allow them to change the voting laws so they could make it harder to vote. Because, one Republican is saying five million illegal immigrants are voting. Well, that just doesn't... Like I say, "Find me five, please." And they can't. 
Well, apparently Rove was pushing very hard to get his prosecutors to find people and bring, basically, false charges against them. In Armed Madhouse, I actually have an interview with the office of one of the fired attorneys, a guy named David Iglesias because some woman--a state politician, legislator, named Justine Fox Young; that's really her name--she's waving papers in the air, saying, "I have evidence here of voter fraud." When I asked her to show me those papers, she wouldn't. She said, "Well, the US prosecutor, US Attorney, is investigating these charges." So I called up Iglesias' office and said, "Are you guys investigating." And Iglesias's people said, No. 
"Wait. He's a Republican prosecutor," I said, "Are you saying that your fellow Republicans are lying? Making up false charges?", and they were silent. I took that as the answer was Yes. What I didn't realize was that he was basically telling me that they weren't bringing charges. I didn't realize that they were pressuring him that if he didn't, he was gonna lose his job. Certainly, me... Rove does read my--as we now know, Rove has read Armed Madhouse and he could see and underline the fact that Iglesias basically called them a liar. So that was the end of his job. 
Scoop:	So, in terms of that whole issue of election fraud, we've now got this Holt Bill, which is an attempt to try and fix up some of the problems. Do you have any views on how effective it is likely to be? 
Palast:	It's such a small one. They've moved way beyond... the whole bill is intent on eliminating computer voting, paperless computer voting, because we absolutely had at least one congressional race obviously rawly stolen. Katherine Harris, her old seat in Congress was stolen by a Republican. There were 18,000 votes that were simply disappeared in the computers. They even admit it. They said they can't find 18,000 votes. Can't find 18,000 votes! It's disappeared, electronically. Zapped. All in Democratic areas, and that race was decided by 500 votes. 
That's created a push, finally, to say, "No more. No more black box voting." But that's just the least of the problem. That doesn't stop the challenges. That doesn't stop... the new game that they do with these registration forms in America is to throw out the registrations. One-and-a-half million registrations were just rejected, which has never happened... It used to be in America, you wanna vote, you register, and that was it. No more. And people don't even realize that they're filling out a registration form to vote, then they go and vote and they're told, "You're not registered." 
Scoop:	Do you have a view on the new governor of Florida? 
Palast:	Well, you know, it's what I call the dead body bounce. It's hard to go... they dropped so low with Jeb Bush, that this guy is a fragment better. But not much better. The one thing he has pushed for--but I don't think he's going to do it; it's more window-dressing than not--is this whole game in Florida, which I had uncovered, of knocking out voters as felons who aren't felons at all. The only way to fix that, by the way... there's no way to fix it. The records are impossible to clean up and fix, it's a mess. 
Black people who came over as slaves, the number of common names, the number of John Smiths and Jesse Jacksons among African Americans is enormous. You cannot work on a basis of saying, "Oh, here's a guy Jesse Jackson should be removed because he is a criminal." You have to eliminate this whole business of having non-citizens in the US, of saying that if you were a felon, you can't vote. Only Florida and a few other states--like, six states out of fifty--say you can't vote if you have a criminal record. 
This non-citizen status is left over from the Ku Klux Klan era and the Soviet Union. The European Union has just said this is a crime against humanity. You cannot tell people that they aren't citizens. 
Scoop:	So, do you have any hope? Are the Democrats taking this whole issue of the decay of democracy seriously yet? We've seen in Ohio that there have been some prosecutions over the weekend.
Palast:	Yeah, there's been some prosecutions--too late. It used to be, when I did racketeering cases--and I used to--that if there was a crime, then the fruits of the crime were seized. Well, there's the White House which is the fruit of the crime, so I think that should be seized and turned back to the public. That ain't gonna happen, but here's what IS happening. 
People are waking up. They can steal a lot of votes, but not all of them. Four-and-a-half million, in the new edition of Madhouse, is our estimate for 2008. In Ohio, people were so disgusted by the theft of the election, by a war gone crazy, by auto plants closing all over the state, that the Republicans were blown so far out of the water that the main vote-fixer, for example--the creepiest vote-fixer, a guy named Blackwell--he only got... the Republicans had controlled the state of Ohio. When he ran for governor, he got only like one in five votes. I mean, he was demolished. Even Republicans refused to voted for him, it became so embarrassing. So people wise up. 
The Democrats coming in... I'm not a Democrat; I'm not a Republican, I'm just... But it has opened up the possibility, as we're seeing now in Congress, of investigations. I did a story for BBC Newsnight, BBC television about these creepy guys, vultures, who were buying up African debt and basically seizing all the money for debt relief for Africa, meant for AIDS medicine, and pocketing it. There's this whole creepy process that these guys have, and they're all cronies of George Bush. I ran that story on BBC and one of our powerful Democratic congressmen went right into Bush's office at the White House and said, "I want you to watch Greg Palast's accusations and I want an answer right now. What's happening to the AIDS money?" 
Now, that could not have happened before the Democrats took control of Congress. I mean, Democratic congressmen couldn't be a chairman of a committee, so he'd have no power. And this guy had the power to kick in the White House door and demand answers. Bush knew he had to give some answer, even if it was bogus, because otherwise they'll subpoena all his guys and haul them in to get the answers. So that's a big difference. The information... now we have a debate. After all, the prosecutors were fired last year, but until the new Congress came in there was no investigation. 
Scoop:	One last question I was going to ask was: We've now got, obviously, to the point with the US Attorney scandal and these lost emails, lost all these emails, that there is, in fact, some progress being made at the White House level by the Democrats. Do you expect it to go further? Do you expect Gonzales to fall and then possibly Rove thereafter? 
Palast:	To me, throwing Gonzales to the wolves is a joke. When Nixon as President was being nailed for Watergate, he put his Attorney General out there, and the tapes have a wonderful... the White House tapes that they found have a great line. They sent out the Attorney General to "twist slowly in the wind". 
Cheney loves watching Gonzales hang and dangle. He loves it. Karl Rove loves it. This guy's taking all the bullets, all the heat. And then they're just gonna cut him down. They're gonna tell him to resign, that he's finished. And that'll be the end of that. But he had nothing to do with it. He was just the shill. When he says he didn't know anything, he didn't know anything. By the way, that doesn't make him not culpable. I used to bring racketeering cases in the United States for something called "willful failure to know", that crime bosses use: "Don't tell me what you're doing but make sure you get it done!" Same with Gonzales. 
When it came out that there was some discussion with him about the US Attorneys, and he says he doesn't remember, I know what he said. He said, "Don't tell me. Get out of the office. I don't want to know." He didn't say "Stop it." He was just, "I don't want to know." But Karl Rove was the guy that did this. Harriet Miers, probably someone you don't know, but she's a real fixer for George Bush, going back to Texas days. 
These are criminals. This is obstruction of justice. It is a crime in the United States to do this. And they're blaming the Attorney General. It ain't the Attorney General... Yes, he should go because this happened and he let it happen. But he wasn't the mastermind. Once again, Karl Rove engineered the leaks in exposing a CIA agent, which was a criminal act. He was the one orchestrating the illegal removal of voters. He was the one orchestrating the firing of prosecutors. And every time these things go to hearings, someone else's head rolls, not his. Libby goes to jail, not Rove. Gonzales will lose his job, not Rove. 
And ultimately there's one other actor in here who's skipping the bullet, which is George Bush. Let us remember he is the guy appointing these prosecutors and removing them. They serve at the request of the President. That's the man. So it's Rove and his nominal boss, even though it's not clear who's the puppet and who's the puppeteer. 
Scoop:	Thank you very much, Greg. 

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