"Operation Eagle Eye" was a Republican effort to suppress minority voting in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1960's, and was headed up by none other than future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.

"Eagle Eye" involved the crude tactic of young Republicans, led by Rehnquist, trying to intimidate mostly older African-Americans and Latinos as they waited in polling lines. Minority voters were warned by Rehnquist and his henchmen that they were committing a federal crime if they were voting while not familiar with the Constitution, according to a variety of accounts, by former Nixon counsel John Dean and personal testimony by former Eagle Eye participants like Louis Rhodes.

At a minimum, the Operation Eagle Eye was intended to cause delays in voting and thus discourage minority voters who were overwhelmingly Democratic in their sympathies. As Dean notes, Rehnquist later went on to lie about his involvement during confirmation hearings when he was being appointed as chief justice.

FLORIDA 2000: COMPUTERIZED THEFT OF VOTING RIGHTS

In recent years, Republican voter suppression tactics have grown more sophisticated. As Greg Palast documented on BBC and in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the 2000 presidential election was swung to George W. Bush by the improper purging of more than 55,000 African-Americans in Florida from the voter lists. These African-Americans were falsely identified as convicted felons and thus ineligible to vote. That scheme involved then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris (also state Bush campaign chairperson), Gov. Jeb Bush, and a firm called DataPoint which carried out the computerized deletion of what would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.

OHIO 2004: "CAGING" AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOTERS

Now a new scandal is emerging about the 2004 elections and illegal efforts by Republicans to "cage" and then purge African-American voters in Ohio and four other key states. (Mark Crispin Miller's book Fooled Again is a very persuasive argument that the 2004 election was stolen by unethical tactics, particularly in Ohio; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has also written compelling case for this charge in Rolling Stone magazine)"Caging" involves sending a registered letter to someone's home; if that person is unwilling to sign for the letter, the Republicans assert that this person does not live at that address and should be eliminated from the list of registered voters.

As Jason Leopold and Matt Renner report in today's Truthout website: (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml">http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml "Previously undisclosed documents detail how Republican operatives, with the knowledge of several White House officials, engaged in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign in a state where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry. "The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day."

The Republican caging program to suppress minority voting will be one of the topics on Bill Moyers' "NOW" program on PBS Friday night July 27.