I heard Mr Hersh on the radio talking on Democracy Now, a incredible story that it seems has gone uninvestigated by the MSM and now Mr Hersh has written a story that explaines the plans of this administration to fix elections in Iraq so thier boy Allawi ramained in power.
Another "off the books" neocon operation, totaly illegal.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050725fa_factGET OUT THE VOTE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
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The January 30th election in Iraq was publicly perceived as a political triumph for George W. Bush and a vindication of his decision to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein. More than eight million Iraqis defied the threats of the insurgency and came out to vote for provincial councils and a national assembly. Many of them spent hours waiting patiently in line, knowing that they were risking their lives. Images of smiling Iraqis waving purple index fingers, signifying that they had voted, were transmitted around the world. Even some of the President’s harshest critics acknowledged that he might have been right: democracy, as he defined it, could take hold in the Middle East. The fact that very few Sunnis, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein, chose to vote was seen within the Administration as a temporary setback. The sense of victory faded, however, amid a continued political stalemate, increased violence, and a hardening of religious divides. After three months of bitter sectarian infighting, a government was finally formed. It is struggling to fulfill its primary task: to draft a new constitution by mid-August.
Whether the election could sustain its promise had been in question from the beginning. The Administration was confronted with a basic dilemma: The likely winner of a direct and open election would be a Shiite religious party. The Shiites were bitter opponents of Saddam’s regime, and suffered under it, but many Shiite religious and political leaders are allied, to varying degrees, with the mullahs of Iran. As the election neared, the Administration repeatedly sought ways—including covert action—to manipulate the outcome and reduce the religious Shiite influence. Not everything went as planned.
The initial election plan, endorsed in late 2003 by Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, involved a caucus system in which the C.P.A. would be able to exert enormous influence over the selection of a transitional government. Each major ethnic group—the Shiites, who represent sixty per cent of the population; the Sunnis, with twenty per cent; and the Kurds, with around fifteen per cent—would have a fixed number of seats in a national assembly. The U.S. hoped to hold the election before the transfer of sovereignty, which was scheduled for June 30, 2004, but the lack of security made the deadline unrealistic. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of one of the Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or sciri, agreed to accept a delay, as the U.S. wanted, in return for the White House’s commitment to hold a direct one-man, one-vote election. President Bush agreed. It was a change in policy that many in the Administration feared would insure a Shiite majority in the new assembly.
...
The focus on Allawi, Campbell said, blinded the White House to some of the realities on the ground. “The Administration was backing the wrong parties in Iraq,” he said. “We told them, ‘The parties you like are going to get creamed.’ They didn’t believe it.”
“What Tom Warrick was trying to do was not stupid,” a senior United Nations official who was directly involved in planning for the Iraqi election told me. “He was desperate, because Bremer and the White House had empowered the Iranians. Warrick was trying to see what could be salvaged.” He added that the answer, as far as the United States was concerned, was Allawi, who, despite his dubious past, was “the nearest thing to an Iraqi with whom the White House could salvage the nation.”
A State Department official confirmed that there was an effort to give direct funding to certain candidates. “The goal was to level the playing field, and Allawi was not the sole playing field,” he said. Warrick was not operating on his own, the State Department official said. “This issue went to high levels, and was approved”—within the State Department and by others in the Bush Administration, in the late spring of 2004. “A lot of people were involved in it and shared the idea,” including, he claimed, some of the N.G.O. operatives working in Iraq. He added, “The story that should be written is why the neoconservatives and others in the U.S. government who were hostile to Iran had this blind spot when it came to the election”—that is, why they endorsed a process that, as Warrick and his colleagues saw it, would likely bring pro-Iranian parties to power.
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A former senior intelligence official told me, “The election clock was running down, and people were panicking. The polls showed that the Shiites were going to run off with the store. The Administration had to do something. How?”
By then, the men in charge of the C.I.A. were “dying to help out, and make sure the election went the right way,” the recently retired C.I.A. official recalled. It was known inside the intelligence community, he added, that the Iranians and others were providing under-the-table assistance to various factions. The concern, he said, was that “the bad guys would win.”
Under federal law, a finding must be submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees or, in exceptional cases, only to the intelligence committee chairs and ranking members and the Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress. At least one Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, strongly protested any interference in the Iraqi election. (An account of the dispute was published in Time last October.) The recently retired C.I.A. official recounted angrily, “She threatened to blow the whole thing up in the press by going public. The White House folded to Pelosi.” And, for a time, “she brought it to a halt.” Pelosi would not confirm or deny this account, except, in an e-mail from her spokesman, to “vigorously” deny that she had threatened to go public. She added, “I have never threatened to make any classified information public. That’s against the law.” (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
The essence of Pelosi’s objection, the recently retired high-level C.I.A. official said, was: “Did we have eleven hundred Americans die”—the number of U.S. combat deaths as of last September—“so they could have a rigged election?”
Sometime after last November’s Presidential election, I was told by past and present intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided to override Pelosi’s objections and covertly intervene in the Iraqi election. A former national-security official told me that he had learned of the effort from “people who worked the beat”—those involved in the operation. It was necessary, he added, “because they couldn’t afford to have a disaster.”
A Pentagon consultant who deals with the senior military leadership acknowledged that the American authorities in Iraq “did an operation” to try to influence the results of the election. “They had to,” he said. “They were trying to make a case that Allawi was popular, and he had no juice.” A government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon’s civilian leaders said, “We didn’t want to take a chance.”
I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that the activities were kept, in part, “off the books”—they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress. Some in the White House and at the Pentagon believed that keeping an operation off the books eliminated the need to give a formal briefing to the relevant members of Congress and congressional intelligence committees, whose jurisdiction is limited, in their view, to officially sanctioned C.I.A. operations. (The Pentagon is known to be running clandestine operations today in North Africa and Central Asia with little or no official C.I.A. involvement.)
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