Anodyne
Monday, July 18, 2005
 
Buying Votes in Iraq -- the New Yorker's Sy Hersh gets the goods:

"Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, put an end to Warrick’s efforts in the early fall. Armitage confirmed this, and told me that he believed that he was carrying out the President’s wishes. 'There was a question at a principals’ meeting about whether we should try and change the vote,' Armitage recalled, and the President said several times, 'We will not put our thumb on the scale.'

Nonetheless, in the same time period, former military and intelligence officials told me, the White House promulgated a highly classified Presidential 'finding' authorizing the C.I.A. to provide money and other support covertly to political candidates in certain countries who, in the Administration’s view, were seeking to spread democracy. 'The finding was general,' a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official told me. 'But there’s no doubt that Baghdad was a stop on the way.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:30 AM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }