Zitat von
The NewYorker
Did Washington try to manipulate ... election?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
(NB.:auszugsweise, da dies nicht nur ein Land, sondern alle Laender betrifft!)
...Campbell acknowledged that he and his colleagues had kept up a running dispute with Warrick. At first, it seemed that the N.G.O.s had won, and the forty million dollars was given in grants for the N.G.O.s to help plan and monitor the election. But the pressure from the Administration to provide direct support for specific parties was unrelenting, and Warrick’s idea didn’t go away. ...
A State Department official confirmed that there was an effort to give direct funding to certain candidates. ... . “A lot of people were involved in it and shared the idea,” including, he claimed, some of the N.G.O. operatives working...
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. ... The process is under the control of the C.I.A. and the Defense Department.” ...
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.) ...
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)...
“The Administration wouldn’t take the chance of doing it within the system,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The genius of the operation lies in the behind-the-scenes operatives—we have hired hands that deal with this.” He added that a number of military and intelligence officials were angered by the covert plans. ...
The methods and the scope of the covert effort have been hard to discern. The current and former military and intelligence officials who spoke to me about the election operation were unable, or unwilling, to give precise details about who did what and where on Election Day. These sources said they heard reports of voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, bribery, and the falsification of returns, but the circumstances, and the extent of direct American involvement, could not be confirmed.
In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration’s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders. ...
Two American election officials ... acknowledged that there were problems but said that, at least in areas where observers were present, they were able to prevent many disputed ballots from being counted. ...
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Die neoliberale Globalisierung steht jetzt schon vor dem Aus. (Die allgegenwärtige Verfemung des Protektionismus – des echten wie des sogenannten – nimmt beschwörerische Züge an.) Was übrig bleibt sind die Schatten beider Teilaspekte: „Globalisierung“ als weltweite Neuordnung und Intensivierung der Abhängigkeiten und Allianzen, „Liberalismus“ als fortlebende (und hochgefährliche, aber überlebte) Ideologie der Neureichen aus jener (verfließenden) Ära des ressourcen-verschleudernden Wachstumskapitalismus.
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