- As internationalists and media pundits praise the "free
and fair" Iraqi elections, a closer look reveals that the polling
in Iraq was fundamentally flawed and lacking transparency in the same way
as elections in the U.S. No wonder that the same people are behind the
organization of both.
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- "Today is a great day for Iraq and a great day for
all those who love democracy," Lorne Craner, former U.S. Asst. Secretary
of State and president of the International Republican Institute (IRI),
said on January 30. "We can all celebrate with Iraq on a successful
election. By taking this brave step the Iraqi people honor all those who
have died for a free democratic Iraq."
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- Asked if the recent election in Iraq was "free and
fair," the United Nations special envoy in Baghdad, Pakistan's Ashraf
Qazi, said, "overwhelmingly so."
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- The fulsome praise of Qazi and Craner needs to be seen
in its proper context. The internationalist groups they represent were
deeply involved - and very well paid - for organizing the flawed Iraqi
elections.
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- "Funded by U.S. taxpayers," The Washington
Post reported on Jan. 26, the IRI, the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs (NDI), two daughter organizations of the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the International Foundation for Election
Systems (IFES), received "as much as $90 million for their work in
Iraq."
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- The NDI "stands at the ambitious heart of the American
effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world," the Post
wrote. It operated in Iraq for more than one year before the elections
and "trained about 10,000 domestic election observers."
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- The boards of these "democracy" organizations
include many of the biggest names in the U.S. political establishment.
The IRI, for example, is chaired by Sen. John McCain (R - Ariz.) and includes
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R - Neb.), Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft,
and Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr., former chairman of the Republican Party.
Fahrenkopf headed the GOP in 2000 when George W. Bush won a seriously flawed
presidential election.
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- The NDI is headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine
K. Albright. William J. Hybl, chairman of the IFES, is also on the board
of IRI. Likewise, the NED is run by some of the most powerful politicos
in the U.S.
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- "The well-funded American democracy programs are
the only game in town," the Post reported. The majority of the staff,
however, is non-American. "We don't look like the face of American
foreign policy," an NDI employee said.
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- "DEMOCRATIC" TYRANTS
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- Sham "democratic" elections have been used
by the occupying powers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, to bestow
an aura of legitimacy on their puppet governments. The three elections,
praised by the mainstream media as triumphs of "democracy," were
imposed on captive nations held "under the gun."
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- In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, the installed ruler and
former consultant for the energy company Unocal, was elected president.
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- In Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, a man with virtually no
support among the people, but popular with U.S., British, and Israeli leaders,
was elected president. Meanwhile, the popular leader of the Palestinian
people, Marwan Barghouti, languishes in an Israeli prison.
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- In Iraq, the appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi is
expected to finish at the top of the pile. Allawi has worked with British
intelligence since the 1980s and with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
since at least 1991, when he co-founded the Iraqi National Accord.
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- "Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,'' President George
W. Bush must have thought as early results pointed to an Allawi victory.
"Trifecta," a term used by Bush, means when a bettor chooses
the first three finishers of a race in order.
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- "He must feel very vindicated," presidential
scholar Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution said about "the
successful voting" in Iraq.
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- Critics, however, say that the elections held under occupation
are not successful.
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- "They're a farce. They're rigged," British
MP George Galloway, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, said about
the elections on Jan. 30.
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- "An election held under foreign military occupation
is always, by definition, utterly flawed," Galloway said. "This
is a festival, a farce that's been held to validate the American-British
invasion and occupation of Iraq. But it will not validate it, neither in
the eyes of the world opinion, nor, more importantly, in the eyes of those
Iraqis who are resisting the foreign occupation. The war will go on, I'm
sorry to say,"
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- Iraq's leading Sunni clerics have declared that any government
emerging from the election would lack legitimacy.
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- "These elections lack legitimacy because a large
segment of different sects, parties and currents ... boycotted," Iraq's
Muslim Clerics' Association said in a statement.
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- "This means the coming national assembly and government
that will emerge will not possess the legitimacy to enable them to draft
the constitution or sign security or economic agreements."
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- "We warn the United Nations and the international
community of the danger of granting these elections legitimacy because
this will open a door of evil and they will be the first to bear responsibility,"
the clerics' group said.
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- "All Iraqi people are waiting for the opportunity
to hold comprehensive, free and just elections that have legitimacy,"
the statement read, "after the withdrawal of the occupation."
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- Abdul Hussein al-Hindawi, the U.S. appointed chairman
of Iraq's electoral commision, acknowledged that polling stations had not
opened and that ballots were lacking in Sunni areas in several provinces.
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- "The elections took place under difficult conditions
and this undoubtedly deprived a number of citizens in a number of areas
from voting," al-Hindawi said.
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- Iraq's interim president Ghazi al-Yawar told a press
conference on Feb. 1, that "tens of thousands," mainly in Mosul,
Basra, Baghdad and Najaf, had not been able to vote due to a "lack
of ballots."
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- But apart from these obvious problems, American Free
Press has discovered fundamental flaws in how the Iraqi elections were
run. These flaws, which remove all transparency and integrity from the
election process, are clearly intentional. They are part of the election
process dictated by the Anglo-American occupiers and the internationalist
organizations that have worked with the occupying powers.
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- The sole election authority in Iraq is the Independent
Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), established by L. Paul Bremer, the
U.S. administrator, on May 31, 2004, in Coalition Provisional Authority
Order 92. CPA Order 96 then defined the electoral law and Order 97 dictated
who could and could not run for office.
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- The effective law in Iraq was promulgated by Bremer on
March 8, 2004. This law will remain in effect until a permanent constitution
is ratified and a government put into place according to the constitution.
A similar law of occupation, the Grundgesetz, is still in effect in Germany,
60 years after the end of World War II because a permanent constitution
has not been created.
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- Eight of the nine board members of the IECI were appointed
by Bremer, while the United Nations appointed the ninth, a 46-year old
Colombian "electoral expert" named Carlos Valenzuela. Valenzuela's
father, Arturo, a professor at Georgetown University, is on the board of
NDI.
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- In IECI Regulation 13/2005, the appointed board of the
"independent" electoral commission dictated how the polling and
counting of the votes would be done. While this regulation calls for the
ballots and votes to be counted and tallied at each polling station, it
calls these tallies "provisional results," which are to be transmitted
to a central location. At the IECI "national tally room, results will
be entered into a database."
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- "When the presiding officer is satisfied with the
accuracy of the count, s/he will announce the provisional results of each
election to those present in the counting station," the regulation
states. It is important to note that the "provisional results"
are not "authenticated," or made official, nor are they publicly
posted. The public is not allowed to view the counting of their votes.
This is a fundamental flaw in the integrity of the Iraqi election process.
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- This is exactly what has happened to U.S. elections with
the introduction of networked electronic voting machines. There is no longer
a public count of the votes in the polling station. The authentication
of the precinct tally by election judges has become meaningless because
they are not allowed to count the votes.
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- UN spokesman Farhan Haq confirmed to AFP that the polling
station results would not be posted at each polling station. Asked why
this fundamental step was being avoided, Haq said he did not know.
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- The official counting of the Iraqi votes is done in the
"national tally room." Some 200 workers, using 80 computers,
were working around the clock in Baghdad's "Green Zone" tallying
the results from some 5,200 polling stations. While each worker would have
to process 26 tally sheets, the final tally, it was reported, could take
more than a week.
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- In Chicago, AFP observed the polling at two locations.
At the Assyrian center in Skokie, some 6,000 people voted. The external
polling was run by the International Organization for Migration, an "arm"
of the UN, according to Kathleen Houlihan, media officer for the IOM.
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- While whole communities were disenfranchised in Iraq,
anyone who had an Iraqi father was allowed to vote in the "diaspora."
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- AFP asked Houlihan if the votes would be counted when
the polls closed at 5 p.m. on Jan. 30. "No," Houlihan said. "They
will be taken to a secure location, and counted later." Asked why
the votes would not be counted openly when the polls closed, another IOM
official said that because the large paper ballots were folded the counting
would have to wait.
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- Here is another fundamental flaw. There is no guarantee
that the ballots counted on Monday are the same ballots that were cast
on Sunday.
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