But, we'd never to listen to somebody who was right!

Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims U.S. "cooked" Iraqi election results during the two week delay between the elections and revelation of the results, dropping the Shi'ite share from actual 56% to the reported 48%:

Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

I have no evidence on this one way or another, but the much-denounced Ritter has been right before when he was a rare voice speaking the truth that there were no WMDs in Iraq. As I speculated a couple of weeks ago, this wouldn't necessarily be immoral on our part: Sistani might have signed off on lowering his own coalition's share, as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa in 1994 in a statesmanlike gesture.