Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran Update: NY Times Jumps the Gun?
Posted on December 14, 2005
Update: Hat tip to one of our readers: Seems the NY Times may have jumped the gun!
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The head of Iraq’s border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday’s elections.
“This is all a lie,” said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq’s borders.
“I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway,” he told Reuters.
Iraq’s frontiers are closed for the period of the election.
“I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident,” Khafaji said.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabor also denied the reports, which the New York Times ran prominently, quoting a single unnamed Interior Ministry source, and said it was an attempt to discredit the election process.
The Times story said a tanker packed with partly filled-in ballots had been stopped by border police at the town of Badra, east of Baghdad, after entering from Iran.
Michelle Malkin asks, WHICH SIDE IS THE NYTIMES ON?
News Busters Bust it!
Captain’s Quarters
Oops! I guess Dexter Filkins and the several layers of editors at the Paper Of RecordTM didn’t think to check out the well-reported fact that the roads in and out of Iraq on both the Iranian and Syrian borders had been closed. That makes it pretty difficult for eighteen-wheelers to sneak in and out of the country. They tend to get bogged down in the sand and dirt otherwise, making it hard to put the ballots into the polling places. And how exactly were these tankers supposed to get the ballots into the boxes anyway — pump them into election stations with a hose? The boxes are watched by election judges and a few thousand outside auditors.
Confederate Yankee is on the case too.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 - Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said.
The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.
The official, who did not attend the interrogation, said he did not know where the driver was headed, or what he intended to do with the ballots.
The seizure of the truck comes at a delicate time in Iran’s relations with both Iraq and the United States. The American government has said Iranian agents are deeply involved in trying to influence events in Iraq, by funneling money to Shiite political parties and by arming and training many of the illegal militias that are bedeviling the country.
Agents of the Iranian government are believed to be supporting the two main Shiite political parties here - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party -with money and other assistance. Both parties support a strong role for Islam in the Iraqi state; however, compared with the Iranian government itself, which is a strict theocracy, the Iraqi version is relatively moderate.
In recent months, American officials in Baghdad and Washington, along with their British counterparts, have contended that sophisticated bombs have been smuggled across the border from Iran, and that some of them have been used against American and British soldiers. The bombs are thought to be far more sophisticated than most of the powerful but rather rudimentary ones used to attack American tanks and convoys here.
Perhaps we should send them all back to Iran inside some missiles! Will the defeatocrats still want to cut and run after hearing this news? Probably even more so knowing them, but it only reinforces the fact that we shouldn’t until the Iraq army is ready. What we should do is cut off the borders and cut off the insurgency at its source.
» Filed Under Border Control/Homeland Security, News, War On Terror
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6 Responses to “Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran Update: NY Times Jumps the Gun?”
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Funny how the Old York Times is reporting that, but they won’t report about the invassion of our Border.
It’s crazy it happend, but I could careless,we already know there constitution is “Sharia Law”, which means, islamic law, and is no worse than Saddamn Husein.
Yeah, there voting, but voting for another whack-job govenrment, that will be no doubt friendly with Iran.
RR
If the NYT is reporting it, then dollar to a donut says it’s leading up to a claim that the elections were fraudulent.
Knight Ridder, perhaps the single best news organization covering the war in Iraq and its political fallout, carried an important exchange in which the head of the Badr Brigade in Iraq, the paramilitary force backed by Iran, flatly admits that his 20,000-strong secret army – which is the arm of the ruling Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – is funded by Iran:
How ironic or bizarre that in 2003 when Bush kicked out weapons inspectors and decided that Iraq was to be the Trojan horse for democratizing the middle-east, Iran was on the terrorists watch list, but Iraq was not. Now in fact Bush is relying on the most radical elements of the Iranian terror exporters to help stabilize Iraq. I guess this is how BushCo and supporters define victory. Don’t tell the children, they’re not ready for tales as twisted and strange as these from Neocon World.
What we should do is cut off the borders and cut off the insurgency at its source.
I’m sure the Sunnis would love us, but the other 90% of Iraq probably wouldn’t understand this brand of “freedom”.
It appears the NY Times piece was a lie.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2005-12-14T104900Z_01_SCH428961_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-ELECTION-BALLOTS.xml&rpc=22
All Things Beautiful TrackBack ‘The New York Times Caught Out….Again’:
“The NYT fraudulently reported the story late last night alleging major ballot fraud on the eve of the Iraqi elections… Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey have the story…..”