It’s not like it was hard to see this coming, but Seymour Hersh reported in this week’s New Yorker that the U.S. has been conducting recon missions inside Iran with the purpose of identifying military targets:
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”
The administration is denying the conclusions of the article, and insists that they are pursuing diplomatic measures to address the threat perceived from Iran. Let’s hope these aren’t from the same diplomacy toolbox we had nearby in the prelude to the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, Hersh’s source has told a pretty detailed story:
The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA’s covert activities overseas.
Now this seems more like the sort of diplomacy this administration has demonstrated: quietly make a deal with the non-democratic leader of the country known to have helped two-thirds of the “axis of evil” develop WMD (this is, ironically, every “axis of evil” member we have not yet militarily occupied), where the terms of the deal protect the individual known to have been a critical link in the WMD proliferation. Fantastic.
I’m reminded of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. It’s a good book, and the thread it follows – connecting the dirtier side of our foreign intelligence dealings with their eventual consequences – makes this sort of unprincipled dealing and duplicitousness all the more terrifying.
(Via truthout.)
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