US probes Venezuelan purchase of electronic voting firm

Federal authorities are investigation an Oakland, California-based software firm and its purchase by a Venezuelan-owned company tied to Hugo Chavez.

Concern is that the regime or its supporters could tamper with elections in the United States and in other countries by rigging the electronic balloting.

The New York Times picks up the story broken by the Miami Herald.

"The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year," according to the Times.

"The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif.," the Times reports. Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government deny any nefariousness.

Bloggers credited with forcing EADS CASA to cancel Chavez sale

Bloggers are being credited with inducing EADS CASA to cancel its $600 million military aircraft contract with the Chavez regime.

Earth Times quotes this blogger as saying, "This is another example of the New Media's impact on international politics."

"Outside the blogosphere, this issue was off the radar screen. Bloggers publicized that EADS-CASA is lobbying Congress to buy its CN-235 and C-295 military planes while it was defying U.S. national security interests to sell the same planes to Chavez," this blogger said in the report.

The report cited another website, SecureTheHomeland.org, through which hundreds of people flooded key congressional leaders with faxes and emails urging Congress to ban any US government purchases of EADS CASA aircraft.

"Lawmakers didn't have to say a thing to the company. The fact that they were alerted was enough," this blogger said in a report picked up by the technology site Sys-Con Media. "The guys who did the website that sent letters into Congress really made the difference."

Spain cancels military aircraft sale to Caracas

The Spanish government announced today that the EADS CASA sale to the Venezuelan regime has been canceled.

Spanish officials cited the company's lost profits, thanks to President Bush's January 2006 invocation of nonproliferation regulations that allow the US to veto the sale of foreign military equipment containing American-made parts. For the past 10 months, EADS CASA has been scrambling to circumvent the antiproliferation measure, trying to replace as many as four or five dozen components in the CN-235 and C-295 aircraft.

Critics denounced the sale, brokered by the Zapatero government last year, as a jobs program for the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party, whose stronghold is in Andalusia where the EADS CASA aircraft factories are located.

As Venezuelastan.com has reported earlier, Spanish officials had predicted that the sale would go through despite US objections and cost overruns. The Zapatero government needed the sale for its political base, and officials reasoned that EADS CASA could recoup the lost profits by selling the same planes to the Pentagon.

UN rebuffs Chavez on Security Council

The United Nations appears to be handing the Chavez regime an unexpected defeat this week - thanks to Chavez's bizarre speech at the General Assembly last month. Members not only fail to give Venezuela the two-thirds vote needed to admit it to the Security Council, but hand a signficant and surprise majority to the US-backed candidate, Guatemala.

With neither side coming close to the two-thirds of the UN's 192 members, a compromise Latin American candidate is likely to emerge.

"Diplomats said that his firebrand speech to this year’s UN General Assembly session, in which he railed against against the United States and called President Bush 'the devil,' may have hurt his nation’s chances," the Times of London reports.

(Meanwhile, the Cuban Communist Party mouthpiece Granma says the US is waging a "dirty war" against Venezuela at the United Nations.)

Ministry of Culture sponsors Oliver Stone film

The Venezuelan Ministry of Culture is sponsoring the debut of Oliver Stone's second pro-Cuba propaganda film, Prensa Latina reports. The film is about supposed recent US plots against the Castro regime.

CITGO owner aids Sandinistas in Nicaragua election

The owner of CITGO is mobilizing Chavez's oil diplomacy to aid the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in its bid to regain political control of Nicaragua.

FSLN presidential candidate Daniel Ortega, who headed the Sandinista junta when allied with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, stands to benefit from the Venezuelan government's generous terms for diesel fuel.

The FSLN "guaranteed the deal clinched in April . . . [with] the state-run company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)," Cuba's Prensa Latina propaganda agency reports.

PDVSA owns CITGO.

The first shipment of PDVSA diesel reportedly arrived in Nicaragua on October 8. Sixty percent of the shipment is to be paid in 90 days (after the election) at free market rates, "but the remaining 40 percent will have a 23-year credit with low interest rates," according to Prensa Latina.

Joining Ortega at the fuel arrival celebration was PDVSA-Caribe President Alejandro Granados "and other important Venezuelan officials," the report says.

The force behind Senator Shelby's push for EADS CASA

Why has Senator Richard Shelby been so single-mindedly pushing EADS CASA planes on the Coast Guard and Pentagon?

First he pushed the CN-235 on the Coast Guard, only to have top Coast Guard admirals express misgivings and budget the funds for programs they said they really needed.

Then EADS CASA pledged to build an assembly plant and maintenance facility in Alabama. But that place would create only 150 jobs - not enough to merit a US senator's time and trouble.

Perhaps the answer to our question lies behind the Wall Street Journal's article about how a former Shelby staffer, Stewart Hall, has turned his contacts into cash through defense contracts and lobbying.

The story of Stewart Hall is just another Washington success story of an ex-congressional aide cashing in big on his Capitol contacts. Nothing unusual there.

Correspondent Brody Mullins, in his October 7 story, "Dialing for Dollars: A Lobbyist's New Twist," focuses on Hall's ownership of a defense contracting company in the Huntsville area.

There's another aspect that Mullins or another journalist might investigate: Hall is a lobbyist for EADS North America, which has pushed successfully for Congress to earmark money for the Coast Guard to buy its CN-235 planes, and is on a big offensive now to get a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract to provide its C-295 as the new Army-Air Force Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA).

Shelby personally inserted the legislation for the earmarks.

He seems unconcerned that the CN-235 and C-295 aircraft, built in Spain by EADS CASA, are an employment program for Spain's Socialist Workers Party, which is harshly anti-American. For someone with as strong a national security record as he, Senator Shelby is out of character pushing for a foreign defense company, dominated by the French government and partially owned by the Russian government, which is seeking a blocking stake in the enterprise.

Senator Shelby has been silent about EADS CASA's sale of both aircraft to the Chavez regime in Venezuela, even though the Bush administration tried to block the sale on national security grounds.

Shelby has said nothing publicly about EADS CASA's deliberate circumvention of American non-proliferation law, and its open defiance - along with Russia - of the US military embargo on the Venezuelan regime.

He did not join his bipartisan colleagues in a June letter to President Bush, where senators expressed concern about EADS CASA and its modernization of Chavez's military.

Our Capitol Hill sources tell us that EADS North America lobbyists have lied about the nature of the Venezuela sale, saying that the US shouldn't be worried as the sale to Chavez won't go through.

But the Venezuelan government has said all along - as recently as this week - that the sale, despite snags, is still on the way.

Now the Wall Street Journal points out that Shelby's former staffer Stewart Hall is a defense lobbyist.

Dig a little deeper and we find that Hall lobbies for EADS North America, which in turn is representing EADS CASA and leads "Team JCA" - the EADS-led group of companies competing to build the Joint Cargo Aircraft.

As a reporter for Roll Call in 2004, Mullins noted that the Federalist Group, headed by Hall and another former Senate staffer, "signed up EADS North America" which had "a lot at stake" in the buy-America provisions of that year's defense authorization bill.

Hall's biography boasts of his expertise in "defense policy" and "appropriations," and that "he has been instrumental in altering and amending federal policy in the areas of . . . defense . . . ."

EADS spent $1.64 million to lobby Congress

As a new foreign defense company with its hands out for American tax dollars, the French/German/Spanish/Russian-owned EADS spent $1.64 million to influence Congress between 2002 and 2004, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

About one-quarter of that sum - $400,000 - went to the Federalist Group, the company owned by Senator Richard Shelby's former staffer Stewart Hall.

More recent figures are not yet available.

Chavez envoy reiterates interest in EADS CASA deal

The Chavez regime is still interested in the EADS CASA aircraft sale, and says that the plans to purchase the CN-235 and C-295 "continue" because Venezuela "wants those planes."

Venezuela's Ambassador to Spain, Arévalo Méndez Romero, tells Europa Press that Caracas is still interested in going through with the purchase. "The purchase of these airplanes goes forward, and therefore, continues," he says.

Ambassador Méndez Romero spoke to reporters in Seville, home of EADS CASA, after being received by Manuel Chaves, the socialist president of the Junta of Andalucia. The Venezuelan envoy called the meeting "very positive for the ties that are consolidating between Venezuela and Andalucia."

Andalucia is the region of Spain that is a stronghold of the ruling Socialist Workers Party.

Europa Press reports, "With respect to the contract of the twelve airplanes, that will be assembled in the EADS factory in Seville, the ambassador manifested that his country 'wants those planes' and assured that 'with time the problem of switching the technology [from American-made to non-US parts] will be resolved.'"

EADS CASA workers rip Israel as a terrorist state

EADS CASA workers in Spain are part of a radical labor union that beats the stuffing out of Israel.

It's pretty dramatic stuff. Here are some specific examples from the newsletter of their union, the anarchist General Confederation of Labor, known by its Spanish initials CGT:

August 17: CGT sponsors protest in Vigo, with CGT activists holding banner calling on President Zapatero to sever diplomatic relations with Israel. The banner - shown above - says, "Zapatero - Break with Israel!"

September 5: CGT announces boycott of new Spanish postage stamps commemorating the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Israel.

September 5: The CGT says there is "nothing to celebrate about Israel" and alleges that the Jewish state is responsible for "thousands of civilians murdered indiscriminately, among them hundreds of children." Israel, according to the CGT, has condemned its neighbors "to live in poverty and submission, in the midst of constant violence."

We thank the folks at CasaCrash.com for pointing out the contents of the newsletter of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) at the EADS CASA plants in Spain.

For EADS CASA union, 'terrorism' is workplace accidents - and Iran is OK

The workers who build the C-295 and CN-235s in Spain belong to a labor union that equates workplace accidents with terrorism, bitterly opposes the war on terrorism, and says that the Iranian government is just fine.

The General Confederation of Labor (CGT)'s view of terrorism is peculiar: for the union, the real terrorism is workplace accidents. The CGT newsletter's terrorism section is simply a list of accidents on the workplace.. Other parts of the newsletter accuse the United States and Israel of committing terrorism.

On September 4, the CGT denounced the "demonization of Iran." A heading in its newsletter says, "The United States Foments Terrorism Against Iran."

The CGT calls concerns about Iran's nuclear program a "lie," saying that "atomic weapons have been condemned by Islam in Iran." It quotes Ayatollah Khamenei as saying, "the manufacture, possession and use of the atomic bom are against the Islamic ethic."

This from the workers who want to build the planes for the US Coast Guard's Deepwater program and the Army and Air Force Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA)!

Venezuela says EADS CASA sale is still in works

While its lobbyists try to keep it ambiguous in Washington, EADS CASA continues actively to pursue its sale of 12 military aircraft to the Venezuelan government.

Venezuelan Vice President Luis Vicente Rangel tells a Spanish newspaper that despite US attempts to block the sale of EADS CASA C-295 and CN-235 planes to Caracas, the deal is still on.

The regime's recent announcement that it will buy 24 Russian Antonov transport planes does not mean that the EADS CASA sale is off. Venezuelan "government sources" tell El Diario de Cadiz that the Chavez government "is not renouncing the purchase of the planes of the EADS CASA enterprise."

"Nevertheless, the commercial operation is in serious difficulties because CASA is moving ahead on a path to sell CASA-295 [planes] to the United States."

Rangel says that Venezuela's relations with Spain are excellent, noting that "President . . . José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero supports us . . . with a valiant and intelligent posture and without prejudice."

Chavez official blasts US for blocking EADS CASA sale

A top Venezuelan official broadsided the United States for blocking the sale of 12 EADS CASA military planes to the Chavez regime.

Foreign Trade Minister Gustavo Márquez blasted what he called Washington's "deplorable pressure" on the Spanish Socialist Workers Party government to "block" the sale of 10 C-295 and 2 CN-235 military transport and patrol aircraft. He said the sale has been "paralyzed" for 20 months since the US moved to veto the transfer of EADS CASA planes that contain American technology.

Márquez made the comments in a meeting with Spanish journalists on October 2, adding that the Bolivarian regime "wishes to expand its commercial relations with Spain." The Barcelona-based business website ab-e.com has the story.

Venezuela militarization a 'concern,' says Rumsfeld

Venezuela's militarization is a troublesome development, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says at a hemispheric meeting in Managua. "I can understand neighbors being concerned," he tells reporters, according to AP.

Gen. Bantz Craddock, chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), adds that Venezuela's accusations of an American plot against the regime are "mindless" and "way over the top." Craddock notes that other countries in the region are worried about Chavez's purchase of Russian warplanes.

Neither official is on record criticizing EADS CASA for helping the Russians arm Chavez.