The article we all felt was most important appears on A6 of this morning's paper. Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger's "Plan Called for Covert Aid in Iraq Vote."
In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President Bush approved a
plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political
parties, but rescinded the proposal because of Congressional oposition, current
and former government officials said Saturday.
In a statement issued in
response to questions about a report in the next issue of The New Yorker,
Fredrick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that "in
the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government
adopted a policy that we would not try -- and did not try -- to influence the
outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for
office."
The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any
covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington, an issue about which
the White House declined to elaborate.
Seymour Hersh, the author of The New Yorker piece (Jehl and Sanger note this), argues that aid was provided. The article's not yet available online (and may not be, Jane Mayer's article "The Experiement" was never made available online). The new edition will go out tomorrow so you can check the site tomorrow (and probably later today) to see if it's gone up yet.
Sidebar, if you like the excerpt appears above, give credit to Ava who showed me the trick while we were working on our TV review this morning. If there aren't complaints, it'll probably be how excerpts are done in the future (with the Democracy Now! post being the exception since it's e-mailed in)
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
