Bush Administration admits to vote fraud plan in Iraq. Did it also happen here? Did stolen Iraq oil loot pay for dirty tricks?

Heretofore, I've made only oblique references to an article we should have discussed some time ago: Seymour Hersh's excellent expose in the New Yorker of the Bush administration's attempt to rig the January 30 elections in Iraq.

Remember? Remember how, after this "election," Bill Maher and Jon Stewart started to turn around on Iraq? Recall all the pious talk about how democracy was on the march throughout the Middle East?

All poppycock. Bush did not and does not want true democracy. In particular, Bush's men do not want to hand Iraq over to a Shi'ite potentially sympathetic to Iran. The Bush administration wanted Iyad Allawi, its chosen puppet, in power in Iraq.

Astonishingly, the Bush administration has admitted that it had a plan in place to give Allawi covert and illegal help. This Democracy Now exchange between Hersh and host Amy Goodman explains much:

AMY GOODMAN: ...The response of the U.S. government, Sy, in yesterday's Washington Post says, "President Bush authorized covert plans last year to support the election campaigns of Iraqis with close ties to the White House, but government and intelligence officials have said the plan was scrapped before the January vote. Some officials with knowledge of the original proposal said the Bush administration backed down after Congressional objections, but others cited concerns within the intelligence community that the effort was likely to backfire." Your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, look, I think just the fact that they made that much of an acknowledgement is pretty amazing because, as you said, this is a president who was publicly saying how fair and open, and the whole issue of whether or not, you know, what we're doing and what the motives are, and this idea that we want to instill democracy, and as I said, the finding was not just limited to Iraq, we're talking about the former Soviet Union, etc. We're doing a lot of talking about restoring democracy. Even the fact they thought about it so long, I think, was a significant acknowledgement.

But look, this is a government that, as I have written about before, has gone off the books. It's gone off the books in the global war on terrorism. By that I mean, we're using -- we're outsourcing operations.

And just how did this outsourcing take place?

What I write is that they simply went off the record, off the books on it. In other words, rather than deal with the C.I.A. and money that was appropriated by Congress, they took money -- I can't -- I don't know from where, one guess would be Iraqi oil money, which we had control of. They took money that had not been appropriated by Congress and put it to work using retired intelligence people and other probably retired military people and others to help generate votes for Allawi. Allawi was running at, oh, 3% or even lower in other polls. 3% during the year. And he improved at the end, because, among other things, the Saudis and the Brits were doing an awful lot right before the election to support him, but nonetheless, in the election, he got 14% or 15%, which was much more than anybody expected.

How did he do it? Well, three or four or five different ways. There was some direct intimidation by Iraqi police of people at the polls telling them how to vote. There was money. There were intelligence, former C.I.A. people who bragged after the election of stuffing ballots. There was also a lot of reports that -- as most people in the audience don't know, the way the election was set up, the Iraqi election, by us, there were 30,000 polling places around the country and only, at the most, 6,000 or 8,000 poll watchers. So there were a lot of places where there was nobody to monitor. And more importantly, really, there was no ability for the American or international press to go throughout the country.

Hm? What's this? Oil money being used for clandestine purposes?

Very interesting. We've been told that Iraqi insurgents have decimated the oil flow, which is why we've not received much relief at the gas pump.

But what if the oil is going through, and what if the neocons are using the profits to fund their worldwide schemes? Back to Hersh:

I just don't know that but, you know, when you talk about cash in Iraq, you don't just talk about cash. You talk about pallet loads of cash. There's an awful lot of money. If anybody wanted -- the London Review of Books recently did an amazing -- they took the six last State Department and U.N. reports on the missing cash in Iraq. Twenty billion dollars, much of it Iraqi oil money, has just disappeared, and there's no accounting for it. I shouldn't say all of it has disappeared, but the accounting is very lax.

The corruption of Iraq and the corruption of our military by the dollars around, the invidious and systematic corruption of our military is just beyond belief.

The article referenced above is titled "Where has all the money gone?" You can find it here. Much of it deals with the kind of corruption we've heard about from other sources -- in particular, Kellog, Brown and Root's demonstrated penchant for outrageous overbilling.

But check out the opening paragraph of the London Review of Books article (which is the source for the "pallet loads" comment above):

On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN's Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn't properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA's inspector general, there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash. Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

This ongoing theft is occurring in a nation where the electricity still does not work.

That's why the troops won't leave. Why abandon a piggy bank that hasn't yet been emptied? The Bush administration is literally robbing Iraq blind to fund its schemes elsewhere.

Could one such scheme be the manipulation of America's election?

The scenario outlined above -- illimitable covert funds, retired clandestine operatives, Saudi involvement, vote manipulation -- strikes me as unnervingly similar to the controversial allegations made by Wayne Madsen. Many vote fraud watchers considered Madsen discredited after he devoted much ink to a crooked entity called Five Star Trust, which -- in retrospect -- may have been nothing more than a scarlet red herring. That false trail was indeed troubling.

Even so, if we look at the matter in the broadest possible terms, Madsen's account of how democracy was subverted in America bears a distinct resemblance to Hersh's account of how democracy was subverted in Iraq.

Now that the Bushites have admitted that they don't care about true democracy in Iraq, what makes you think that they care about true democracy in America? This country's elections are the real prize.