The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (75 page)

As a result of its investigation, the FHP found that some policy violations had occurred, but concluded that no citizen was unreasonably delayed or prohibited from voting as a result of the Oak Ridge Road checkpoint. The policy violations cited by FHP’s investigators included the fact that the checkpoint site was not on the monthly preapproved list and the media notification policy was not followed. The investigators recommended “counseling” for the sergeant in charge of the checkpoint and the district commander in charge of the media notification.

Colonel Hall stated the FHP was “very concerned about the perception people may have about what the patrol did that day.” The Commission heard testimony from voters in Tallahassee regarding their reaction to the FHP’s actions on Election Day. Roberta Tucker, an African American woman and a longtime resident of Tallahassee, was driving along Oak Ridge Road on her way to vote. Before Ms. Tucker could reach her polling place, she was stopped at an FHP vehicle checkpoint conducted by approximately five white troopers. According to Ms. Tucker, the checkpoint was located at the only main road leading to her assigned polling place. One of the troopers approached Ms. Tucker’s car, asked for her driver’s license, and after looking at it, returned it to her and allowed her to proceed. Ms. Tucker considered the trooper’s actions to be “suspicious” because “nothing was checked, my lights, signals, or anything that [the state patrol] usually check.” She also recalled being “curious” about the checkpoint because she had never seen a checkpoint at this location. Ms. Tucker added that she felt “intimidated” because “it was an Election Day and it was a big election and there were only white officers there and like I said, they didn’t ask me for anything else, so I was suspicious at that.”

In response to the allegations of voter intimidation surrounding this checkpoint, Colonel Hall stated that “the checkpoint was properly conducted, and it was not anywhere near a polling facility, and I don’t see how that could affect anybody’s ability to vote.” He added that he was “not really” surprised to learn that a trooper may have asked for a driver’s license and not registration. He explained that such an action could occur if vehicles had begun to back up. Moreover, Colonel Hall stated he was “disappointed” that the FHP could not speak with Ms. Tucker because she refused to cooperate with their investigation. Ms. Tucker testified, however, that she reported the incident to her local NAACP and never returned the FHP’s calls because “I felt it was a civil rights issue … I felt like it was sort of discriminatory.”

[...]

CONCLUSION

A wide variety of concerns have been raised regarding the use and effectiveness of Florida’s voting system controls during the 2000 presidential election. Many Floridians were denied their opportunity to vote, in what proved to be a historic general election because of the narrow vote margin separating the candidates. Some voters were turned away from their designated polling places because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters. Other voters discovered that their precincts were no longer being used or had moved to another location, without notice from the supervisor of elections office. In other instances, voters who had been standing in line to vote at their precincts prior to closing, were told that they could not vote because the poll was closed. In addition, thousands of voters who had registered at motor vehicle licensing offices were not on the rolls when they came to vote. The Commission also heard from several voters who saw Florida Highway Patrol troopers in and around polling places, while other troopers conducted an unauthorized vehicle checkpoint within a few miles of a polling place in a predominantly African American neighborhood.

The Commission’s investigation demonstrated an urgent need for attention to this issue by Florida’s state and local officials, particularly as it relates to the implementation of statewide election reforms. Without some effective redress, the pervasive problems that surfaced in the 2000 election will be repeated.

DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

Alors
. It was the middle of the night in Paris on 14 May 2011 when the news broke that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Chief of the International Monetary Fund had been pulled off Air France flight 23 in New York and arrested for sexual assault on a hotel maid at the city’s Sofitel Hotel. Strauss-Kahn – or “DSK” as he is widely known in his homeland of
la Belle
France – protested his innocence, stated that the incident was consensual, and lo! conspiracy theories asserting that he was the victim of a “honey trap” immediately viralled over the blogosphere. And not just the blogosphere; one opinion poll found that nearly 60 per cent of French society believed that a sting operation had placed the West African immigrant maid in a $3,000 a night Sofitel suite to discredit DSK. No less than Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, hinted that DSK had likely fallen victim of a shadowy plot: “It is hard for me to evaluate the real political underlying reasons and I do not even want to get into that subject, but I cannot believe that everything is as it seems and how it was initially presented … It does not sit right in my head.”

The most believable conspiracy theory as to
why
DSK was framed concerns the French presidential election: the silver-haired politician had been set to announce his candidacy for the 2012 French presidential elections – and was likely to be the Parti Socialiste’s strongest runner against President Sarkozy. By this version of the DSK conspiracy, Sarkozy wanted to eliminate DSK from the race, so set him up for a sex-baited trap.

The evidence? The most interesting “proof ” from proponents of the Sarko-dunnit theory is the curious timing of a Tweet. Before the media broke the story of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, Jonathan Pinet, a youth activist in Sarkozy’s UMP party tweeted “a friend in the US just told me that #DSK was arrested by the police in a NYC hotel one hour ago”. The tweet was posted at 4.59 p.m. New York time, just ten minutes after Mr Strauss-Kahn was seized, raising questions on how Pinet had obtained the information so fast. And why he tweeted “hotel” when DSK was arrested on an Air France jet. Pinet’s tweet was almost immediately retweeted by Arnaud Dassier, a journalist known to be a DSK-loather, and who had published an infamous anti-DSK article featuring the IMF chief in a Porsche with his wife – not great publicity for a socialist man of the people. The first website to mention the news was 24heuresactu.com, a conservative operation. Meanwhile
Le Monde
quoted an unnamed “right-wing heavyweight” as saying, “It happened as planned,” and a user of Post.fr accused Pinet of participating in “a carefully orchestrated operation” by the UMP.

Interestingly, Strauss-Kahn had previously given an off-the-record interview with France’s
Libération
newspaper saying he suspected that his enemies would plot to destroy his career. He imagined “a woman (who I supposedly) raped in a car park and who had been promised 500,000 or a million euros to invent such a story.” A woman like the Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo, perhaps, who was not quite the innocent mother portrayed by the prosecutor’s office, having apparently lied in her asylum application and married a drug-dealer.

By the weird coincidence every good conspiracy needs, DSK’s room number at the Sofitel was 2806, which corresponds to the date of the opening of the Socialist Party primaries in France, 28 June.

According to another, minority, strand of the “
l’affaire
DSK”, the sixty-three-year-old Frenchman was an innocent victim in a much bigger scheme. Michelle Sabban, a supporter of Strauss-Kahn and Vice-President of the Regional Council of Ile-de-France, told
Le Monde
: “I am convinced it is an international conspiracy. It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him … It’s the IMF that they wanted to decapitate, not just the candidate in the Socialist primary.”

A number of prominent economists stepped forward to explain that under Socialist DSK the IMF had taken a pro-left, pro-Third World tilt. They quoted his words in an address at George Washington University: “Globalisation has delivered a lot … but it also has a dark side, a large and growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Clearly we need a new form of globalisation to prevent the ‘invisible hand’ of loosely regulated markets from becoming ‘an invisible fist’.”

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in Reagan’s time, added his dime’s worth in a syndicated column: “Strauss-Kahn is being framed up because the IMF recently announced that ‘the age of America is over’, that China will be the number one economy within five years. This was a massive blow to Washington, and they are taking their revenge.”

Meanwhile, news reports from Russia suggested that DSK was arrested because he had discovered that the USA was stalling in its pledged delivery of 191.3 tons of gold to fund the Special Drawing Rights. Another report out of Russia, picked up by the
EU Times
, stated that: “a new report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Federal Security Service (FSB) says that former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged and jailed in the US for sex crimes on May 14th after his discovery that all of the gold held in the United States Bullion Depository located at Fort Knox was ‘missing and/or unaccounted’ for.”

The verdict on
l’affaire
DSK: there is little reason to suspect that Pinet’s tweet was anything other that what he said it was – message from a friend working at the Sofitel in Manhattan. Dessaier, as a known opponent of DSK, could hardly be expected to have done anything other than retweet with glee. Although bluffing cannot be ruled out, it is significant that the French interior minister, Claude Guéant – a close associate of President Nicolas Sarkozy – dismissed as “scandalous” suggestions made by DSK’s Socialist pals that his arrest in New York was organized in Paris. Guéant advised Socialist politicians to “make a formal legal complaint … or shut up.” Similarly, the French Accor hotel group, which owns the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan where the sexual attack allegedly took place, threatened legal action against anyone who suggested that the company had been involved in a plot against Mr Strauss-Kahn. And the idea that DSK was a tribune of the people at the IMF is risible. Ask the people of Greece.

The most likely explanation of the DSK affair is the most obvious one. DSK had a reputation as a predatory womanizer. “The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn,” Jean Quatremer of
Libération
had noted in 2007, “is his attitude to women. He is too insistent …” Despite being married to French TV reporter (and multi-millionairess) Anne Sinclair, he had an affair with a junior Hungarian colleague at the IMF. After DSK’s arrest at JFK airport, the French journalist Tristane Banon came forward to announce that DSK had made a sexual attack on her a number of years before. Strauss-Kahn was not helped by the news that Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who put him up as IMF president, advised him to keep his trousers zipped in America and not to get into elevators with interns.

The criminal charges against DSK were eventually dismissed at the request of the prosecution due to serious doubts about Diallo’s credibility (see Document, p.533). At this point, supporters of Ms Diallo suggested that
she
was the victim of conspiracy involving the best lawyers and muckrakers money can buy.

Oh, and DSK’s nickname? Le Perv.

DOCUMENT: RECOMMENDATION FOR DISMISSAL: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK AGAINST DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

The People of the State of New York move to dismiss the above-captioned indictment, which charges the defendant with sexually assaulting the complainant at a hotel in midtown Manhattan on May 14, 2011. The crimes charged in the indictment require the People to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant engaged in a sexual act with the complainant using forcible compulsion and without her consent. After an extensive investigation, it is clear that proof of two critical elements – force and lack of consent – would rest solely on the testimony of the complaining witness at trial. The physical, scientific, and other evidence establishes that the defendant engaged in a hurried sexual encounter with the complainant, but it does not independently establish her claim of a forcible, nonconsensual encounter. Aside from the complainant and the defendant, there are no other eyewitnesses to the incident. Undeniably, then, for a trial jury to find the defendant guilty, it must be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the complainant is credible. Indeed, the case rises and falls on her testimony. At the time of the indictment, all available evidence satisfied us that the complainant was reliable. But evidence gathered in our post-indictment investigation severely undermined her reliability as a witness in this case. That an individual has lied in the past or committed criminal acts does not necessarily render them unbelievable to us as prosecutors, or keep us from putting them on the witness stand at trial. But the nature and number of the complainant’s falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever the truth may be about the encounter between the complainant and the defendant. If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so.