[continued from previous message]   
      
   > security, including a collective assessment from the intelligence   
   > community. Should concerns remain, one of the agencies involved can   
   > request an additional and more rigorous 45-day investigation.   
   >   
   > In the case of the ports deal, the transaction was approved by the   
   > investment committee. But the Dubai company later abandoned the deal,   
   > agreeing to sell out to an American company after a barrage of criticism   
   > by legislators from both parties who said the administration had not   
   > adequately reviewed the deal or informed Congress about its   
   > implications.   
   >   
   > The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and   
   > the Chávez government have been well known to United States   
   > foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which   
   > Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an   
   > official margin of nearly 20 percent.   
   >   
   > Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a   
   > statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts   
   > in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the   
   > pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.   
   >   
   > At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan   
   > election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said.   
   > “They did it all wrong,” one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a   
   > professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an   
   > interview.   
   >   
   > Opposition members of Venezuela’s electoral council had also protested   
   > that they were excluded from the bidding process in which Smartmatic and   
   > a smaller company, the Bizta Corporation, were selected to replace a   
   > $120 million system that had been built by Election Systems and Software   
   > of Omaha.   
   >   
   > Smartmatic was then a fledgling technology start-up. Its registered   
   > address was the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the father of one of the two   
   > young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio   
   > Mugica and Alfredo Anzola, and it had a one-room office with a single   
   > secretary.   
   >   
   > The company claimed to have only two going ventures, small contracts for   
   > secure communications software that a Smartmatic spokesman said had a   
   > total value of about $2 million.   
   >   
   > At that point, Bizta amounted to even less. Company documents, first   
   > reported in 2004 by The Herald, showed the firm to be virtually dormant   
   > until it received the $200,000 investment from a fund controlled by the   
   > Venezuelan Finance Ministry, which took a 28 percent stake in return.   
   >   
   > Weeks before Bizta and Smartmatic won the referendum contract, the   
   > government also placed a senior official of the Science Ministry, Omar   
   > Montilla, on Bizta’s board, alongside Mr. Mugica and Mr. Anzola. Mr.   
   > Montilla, The Herald reported, had acted as an adviser to Mr. Chávez on   
   > elections technology.   
   >   
   > More recent corporate documents show that before and after Smartmatic’s   
   > purchase of Sequoia from a British-owned firm, the company was   
   > reorganized in an array of holding companies based in Delaware   
   > (Smartmatic International), the Netherlands (Smartmatic International   
   > Holding, B.V.), and Curaçao (Smartmatic International Group, N.V.). The   
   > firm’s ownership was further shielded in two Curaçao trusts.   
   >   
   > Mr. Stoller, the Smartmatic spokesman, said that the reorganization was   
   > done simply to help expand the company’s international operations, and   
   > that it had not tried to hide its ownership, which he said was more than   
   > 75 percent in the hands of Mr. Mugica and his family.   
   >   
   > “No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any   
   > stake in Smartmatic,” Mr. Stoller said. “Smartmatic has always been a   
   > privately held company, and despite that, we’ve been fully transparent   
   > about the ownership of the corporation.”   
   >   
   > Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the   
   > shares the Venezuelan government received in it were “the guarantee for   
   > a loan.”   
   >   
   > Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia’s   
   > electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal   
   > and state election agencies.   
   >   
   > But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia   
   > voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities.   
   > Smartmatic’s new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public   
   > hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help   
   > with the vote.   
   >   
   > Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software   
   > component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer,   
   > that was developed in Venezuela.   
   >   
   > --   
   > The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,   
   > to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable,   
   > and challenge the unchallengeable.   
      
      
      
      
   --   
   The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,   
   to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable,   
   and challenge the unchallengeable.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)