Revising Fake Iraq Ballot Box Story?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, The World, WarHmm…it looks like the Iraqis are now denying that a few trucks from Iran carrying bogus ballots boxes entered the country.
From Reuters:
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.
If this story does indeed prove to be false, I highly doubt that the New York Times had some nefarious machinations publishing the story. Althought it wouldn’t be the first story about Iraq they’ve been burned on recently **coughWMDScough**.
Here’s a possible reasoning as to why this could be rumor:
Khafaji said that when he established the reports were false he tracked the source of the rumor, and said it appeared to have come from the Defense Ministry’s intelligence unit.[...]
Rumors and “dirty tricks” have featured in the build-up to the election, the first for a full-term parliament since a U.S.-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Some Sunni Arab candidates have sought to discredit the Shi’ite-dominated government ahead of the vote, and Shi’ite candidates have disparaged Sunni challengers.
Looks like we’re in wait-and-see mode now, but it looks more and more like the story is false.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 and is filed under Elections, The World, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 14th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
It looks like a source problem. The info turned up at the top of the NYT’s main Iraq story late last night.
Dexter Filkins had the byline on the story. He’s been in Iraq quite a bit since the overthrow of Saddam. But he likely just wrote the wrap on it, and didn’t do any of the reporting. That’s the way the NYT operates, though you wouldn’t know that just to read through a piece. (See “Over There: From The Bronx to Baghdad,” by NYT reporter Alan Feuer, for an excellent description of how this works).
The note on the story says “Kirk Semple in contributed reporting from Ramadi for this article, and Khalid Al-Khassan from Baghdad.” Nobody from the Times, apparently, saw the truck or was within hundreds of miles of the city where it supposedly turned up.
The top of the story attributes all the information about the truck-full of ballots to “an official at Iraq’s Interior Ministry,” and later says he “spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.” Presumably this info came from Al-Khassan. The old anonymous source that bites you in the ass.