A couple of things recently make me think we need a new branch of state - or an addition to the judiciary.

First, Burnham et al's estimation of deaths in Iraq in the Lancet - Nature has an article (which I don't think I can link to) that says:

None of the experts contacted by Nature said that their doubts fatally undermined the study. Some, such as Daponte, would have liked the authors to have better assessed their method's shortcomings before releasing a result with such political impact. But most say the result is a welcome addition to conflict epidemiology, which is now seen as playing a central role in assessing the severity of wars, and in helping states recover from them.

It has flaws, but its the best we have. They also point out:

Data from other conflicts show that such sampling is much more accurate than media reports, which usually account for no more than 20% of deaths. "Random counts force you to go to places that aren't convenient," says Jana Asher, a researcher with the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. "The media don't wander off to distant locations. It's a very different type of data collection."

Whereas politicians in Iraq, the UK and the US say they think it's flawed. Right. (Here's a good round-up of opinions).

Second: evidence from the 2004 US ballot apparently continues to produce results that suggest something went wrong in Ohio (as well as other places) in such a way as to benefit Bush. Well, actually enough to give him the election. Some good people also continue to work on producing methods that would guarantee any anomalies could be picked up quickly before anyone concedes. Bizarrely - to me - very few checks seem to have been put in place particularly for the new computerized systems; there's no back-up method for recording votes, for example.

Another couple of links here and here from www.freepress.org. Glad to see a lack of twin towers stuff on that site. (Though that'd be because anyone who's into 9/11 conspiracies generally already believes the Bush administration always steals elections, and that the UK government killed its own people on 7/7...)

What links them? Well, stats of course. But also their slipperiness. In the case of the Iraq study, there should be some legal way of nailing politicians down - some form of libel allowable short of calling a study fraudulent (as Crooked Timber notes someone has done and then quickly been undone.

Perhaps there could be but, like the David Irving trial it could take a bloody long time. But that'd be OK if politicians kept it in mind, and were forced to consider their blind denials more carefully.

The US case is more about silence than anything else. Whether or not the stats genuinely supports the conclusion that a number of different things were fiddled with - some very seriously - if democracy is the bedrock of the US, why is no-one clinging to the case? Where's the recourse? There were local problems that did get chased up - e.g. as this doc shows, the Lucas County Election Board were suspended for various fuck-ups, including failing to maintain ballot security or failing to implement any tracking system for votes and 'manipulation of the process'. Resignations followed - but nothing else. (More docs from the Rolling Stone article (yup, originally covered best in a music mag...) which has loads of really good links.)

As I'm writing this I'm thinking: gosh, isn't it easy to make a case through sheer weight of words and insinuation. I almost mentioned that one of the resignations was a woman who was both chair of the Lucas Republican Party and of the Lucas election board. That means nothing, and there's no reason why someone couldn't be, as long as the surrounding systems were democratic (e.g. the board was mixed and everyone accountable. That seems to have badly failed in this case.)

So: can it be shown there was fraud? Was the fraud localised - just one or two boards playing the system to benefit themselves? Is there a trail that takes it anywhere else?

I asked one of the authors of a stats report, who works with US counts dot org, why the press hadn't chased this more. He replied:

State of denial. Fear of right wing attacks after Dan Rather. Corporate (Republican) ownership of most big media. Hubris - this couldn't possibly happen in U.S. Also, Democratic candidate's capitulation (especially Kerry , Gore seems to have had bad advice). Your guess is a good as mine!

The media have a big weight of expectation put upon them to serve a vital democratic function - but do they succeed? The point of what I'm saying here is that, actually, they can't. They can nail a truth right down, and it won't matter.

We have un-refutable proof this thing is white!

... they might say. Blair (and everyone else on-message via their computer system might reply:

Well, actually, (impatient huf), this is what I've always said. Black is, in a real sense, white, it's always been our policy and that's what we're working towards.

Fucker! Twat-head! We should have a legal route to drag him in front of a judge and - no, better, he should be put in a cell with a couple of logicians, and maybe some linguists. Good philosopher bad philospher. He should then be forced to work very carefully through the words of, say, General Dannatt's comments until he admits that, in fact, words still do have meaning, and he must capitulate to a priori truths, before being forced to actually answer the empirical challenge of the statement. He should then be marched to a podium and made to tell everyone that, yes, white is in fact white.

The rest of the world may know it, but politics is being hollowed out by these people. Politics is getting stuff done without violence. The more it gets hollowed out, the more we strip the flesh from the body politic, leaving only the solid bones of violence underneath.

What am I going on about? More bad metaphors...

Rant over, anyway.