Monday, July 18, 2005

Michael: Hersh on the WH's Attempt to Influence the Iraqi Elections

From The New Yorker:

"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.)"


Hersh's article confirms in detail what many have long suspected - this Administration will stop at nothing to get its way, whatever the means. They were, and are, running secret ops off the books to influence the internal affairs of foriegn nations. This is lawlessness and corruption at its worst. For this Administration to speak of democracy and freedom while secretly running covert ops out of the Pentagon's back door is the worst sort of hypocrisy; the kind that damages our national interest and reputation. Just who the hell do these people think they are? They operate as if they are above the law.

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