US making plans to attack Iran - report

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Jan. 19 (AGR)-- The New Yorker magazine said on Jan. 17 that Washington has been conducting secret reconnaissance inside Iran for several months as a possible prelude to military strikes.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that President George W. Bush plans to drastically expand the war on terrorism, and has already signed executive orders authorizing secret commando operations against alleged terrorist targets in as many as ten middle eastern and south Asian nations, including Iran.

The Iranian operation, which the article claims has been underway since last summer with aid by Pakistan and Israel, intends to identify as many three dozen Iranian military or nuclear sites for US missile attacks or commando raids.

Hersh further asserts that Bush and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-World War II national security state. The veteran journalist suggests Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control — against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism — during his second term.

Hersh was told by top-level Washington insiders that the war on terrorism would not only be expanded, but effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control.

The president’s radical restructuring enables Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books — free from legal restrictions imposed on the CIA. Under current law, all CIA covert activities overseas must be authorized by a presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” one former high-level intelligence official told Hersh.

In his interviews, Hersh was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former official is quoted as saying. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned —not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency piss-ants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the CIA is out of there.”

“The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told Hersh.

The US task force, aided by information from Pakistan, Hersh reports, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground nuclear installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices — known as sniffers — capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

Hersh quotes the former high-level intelligence official as saying that the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has won a high price for its cooperation — American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to any international authorities for questioning. “It’s a deal —a trade-off,” the former official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’

Strategists at the headquarters of the US Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran.

The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it,” the former official told Hersh.

With the Pentagon’s newly enhanced authority it is suggested that the CIA’s paramilitary arm will be placed under Rumsfeld’s control. Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations.

Under Rumsfeld, Hersh was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities.

“Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked Hersh, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early 1980s. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

The Pentagon was unusually quick to criticize aspects of Hersh’s article, saying in a written statement it “is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.” But Bush told NBC News later that day that he would not rule out taking military action against Iran. Iran’s defense minister, Ali Shamkhani, responded to the threat by saying his country had enough military might to thwart any attack.

Meanwhile, bipartisan groups in Congress are currently setting their sights on promoting “regime change” in Iran. As a result, new exiled Iranian opposition groups backed by Washington neoconservatives are seeking large doses of US funding.

One such group is the Alliance for Democracy in Iran. Its board members are relatively obscure; some of them are monarchists. Its Oxford-educated chairman, Bahman Batmanghelidj, opened a ski resort near Tehran before the 1979 Islamic revolution and is a property magnate in Virginia.

The group has an Accountability Project to identify friends and foes in the US.

A prominent backer of the Alliance is Jerome Corsi, well known for his role in the Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth campaign against John Kerry, the recent Democratic presidential candidate. He believes the freeze on nuclear development agreed between Iran and the European Union will collapse by March and that Israel, supported by the US, will then launch military strikes.

In Congress, the proposed Iran Freedom and Support Act, sponsored by senators Rick Santorum and John Cornyn, calls on the administration to back “regime change” and promote and fund the transition to a democratic government through alliances with opposition groups. A funding of $3 million for Iranian opposition activities has already been inserted by Congress into the 2005 budget.

The US also backs Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s former shah, who uses a satellite TV station in Los Angeles to beam anti-regime views into Iran.

Shrugging off the Pentagon’s rebuke, Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, said he was “untroubled.”

“You cannot worry about what public relations people say,” he said. “While it’s wonderful to go after me personally, none of [their] attacks dealt with the substance of what I was writing about. Are we operating in Iran? Is there a new understanding of what the Pentagon can do? All of that is not dealt with.”

The Guardian reported on Jan. 18 that the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border to collect intelligence. A former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neoconservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee “MEK cross-border operations.” He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun.

“They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-Contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran,” the former officer said.

“They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilize the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world’s problems are solved. I think it’s delusional,” the former CIA officer said.

Sources: Sources: Associated Press, Democracy Now!, Financial Times (UK), Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), The New Yorker, Reuters