CIA Chief Says Karzai Has Won Election

By Steve Hynd

In a remarkably tone-deaf interview with VOA News, Leon Pannetta has said that, in his opinion, Hamid Karzai is the winner of the Afghan election.

"It's clear that there was some degree of corruption and fraud involved in the election," Panetta said. "It's being viewed now by the commissions involved in counting those votes. I think what appears to be the case is that even after they eliminate some of the votes that resulted because of fraud, that Karzai will still - still looks like the individual who's going to be able to win that election."

The CIA head has thus fatally undermined the Obama administration's calming public stance of "wait and see" until the election commission has finished its investigations - everyone in Afghanistan and the region will now assume Panetta is stepping out ahead of the official line and saying what the U.S. really wants.

He's also set up a direct comparison with Iran, where Ahmadinejad would probably have won without "pulling a Nixon" too. It's bad enough that the Obama administration is showing a hypocritical face to the world by condemning Iranian illegal detention and torture of political prisoners while Panetta and others refuse to hold America's own torturers accountable. But now, if Afghans take to the streets in protests - or worse, take to armed insurgency - over Karzai's crooked and illigitimate election, the U.S. won't have a moral leg to stand on.

(No, I'm not in any way excusing what Iran's hardline government is doing to its own people right now. It's disgusting. I remain a reluctant apologist for an odious regime on Iran's nuclear program and the way in which it is being hyped by Western hawks to their own political ends, though.)

By the way, guess who else has hailed Karzai's election today? Ahmadinejad!

Update: The Guardian has yet more proof that the election was rigged bigtime.

The shaky footage shows two election monitors inspecting a book of 100 ballot papers that are still stitched together, as they were intended to arrive at the polling station in rural Afghanistan. But something is wrong; instead of being pristine, ready for the voter to make his or her mark, each paper bears a large blue tick next to the name of one candidate: Hamid Karzai.

As the monitors flick through the pad, the back of the ballots clearly show the authorisation stamp of election monitors, validating them as votes ready to be put in the ballot box and counted.

"We found it the day after the elections," one of the monitors in the footage told me. "They were trying to put it in one of the [ballot] boxes but didn't have time, so we took it home and filmed it. If we had given it back to the election committee they would have used it again, so we burned it, but filmed it to protect ourselves if they come and threaten us."

Video at the link...and Panetta's a bloody idiot. An estimated 1 out of 3 votes fraudulent with only a 35% turnout is not just "some degree of corruption".