FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Re: FW: long reading, very disturbing

Re: FW: long reading, very disturbing	<– Date –> <– Thread –>
From: Carol Koepp (carolkoeppcomcast.net)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 10:47:54 -0700 (PDT)

I heard the very end, when Terri G said something like "how can an unpopular president take such action in the very last days of office? Why would congress give him the authority to do it?" and the answer was, don't put it past him. He will be active until the 11th hour and 59th second of the 59th minute of his term. There was also some statement about lack of backbone in Congress. ----- Original Message ----- From: <hanse002 [at] umn.edu> To: "Carol Koepp" <carolkoepp [at] comcast.net> Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 9:16 AM Subject: Re: [sa-talk] FW: long reading, very disturbing


Hersh was on Terri Gross' Fresh Air last night, and the information was, to
quote Jim, "very disturbing." She referred to his article published in the
latest New Yorker. I don't know if this is the same article, or there's
more. I'm going to buy the magazine today. If you have a chance, listen to
the Fresh Air interview, too.

Adele


On Jun 30 2008, JAMES LYNSKEY wrote:


From: countynews [at] myway.comDate: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:54:20 -0400

Dear Friends-This is quite serious, worth a call to your representatives
in Congress.-jl Annals of National Security Preparing the Battlefield The
Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran. by Seymour M.
Hersh July 7, 2008

Operations outside the knowledge and control of commanders have eroded
â?othe coherence of military strategy,â?? one general says. from
President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against
Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and
congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought
up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential
Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the countryâ?Ts
religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the
minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident
organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iranâ?Ts
suspected nuclear-weapons program. Clandestine operations against Iran
are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting
cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential
authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al
Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking
them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of â?ohigh-value
targetsâ?? in the Presidentâ?Ts war on terror, who may be captured or
killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which
involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the
current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified
in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious
questions about their nature. Under federal law, a Presidential Finding,
which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence
operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to
Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the
ranking members of their respective intelligence committeesâ?"the
so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed
from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional
committees, which also can be briefed. â?oThe Finding was focussed on
undermining Iranâ?Ts nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the
government through regime change,â?? a person familiar with its contents
said, and involved â?oworking with opposition groups and passing
money.â?? The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in
southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political
opposition is strong, he said. Although some legislators were troubled by
aspects of the Finding, and â?othere was a significant amount of
high-level discussionâ?? about it, according to the source familiar with
it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some
members of the Democratic leadershipâ?"Congress has been under Democratic
control since the 2006 electionsâ?"were willing, in secret, to go along
with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran,
while the Partyâ?Ts presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama,
has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy. The request for
funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to
terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that
concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The
Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while
saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that
urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat.
President Bush questioned the N.I.E.â?Ts conclusions, and senior
national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did
Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.)
Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian
leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq:
both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly,
by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods.
(There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times,
among others, has reported that â?osignificant uncertainties remain about
the extent of that involvement.â??)

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White Houseâ?Ts
concern about Iranâ?Ts nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about
whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials
believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran
is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that
more diplomacy is necessary. A Democratic senator told me that, late last
year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met
with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held
regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration
staged a preÃ«mptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled,
â?oWeâ?Tll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be
battling our enemies here in America.â?? Gatesâ?Ts comments stunned the
Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was
speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gatesâ?Ts answer, the
senator told me, was â?oLetâ?Ts just say that Iâ?Tm here speaking for
myself.â?? (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the
consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he
said, other than to dispute the senatorâ?Ts characterization.) The Joint
Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were â?opushing
back very hardâ?? against White House pressure to undertake a military
strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me.
Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror
said that â?oat least ten senior flag and general officers, including
combatant commandersâ??â?"the four-star officers who direct military
operations around the worldâ?"â?ohave weighed in on that issue.â?? The
most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until
recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of
American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under
pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations
about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the
Financial Times that the â?oreal objectiveâ?? of U.S. policy was to
change the Iraniansâ?T behavior, and that â?oattacking them as a means to
get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.â?? Admiral
Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that
there were people in the White House who were upset by his public
statements. â?oToo many people believe you have to be either for or
against the Iranians,â?? he told me. â?oLetâ?Ts get serious. Eighty
million people live there, and everyoneâ?Ts an individual. The idea that
theyâ?Tre only one way or another is nonsense.â?? When it came to the
Iraq war, Fallon said, â?oDid I bitch about some of the things that were
being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.â?? The Democratic
leadershipâ?Ts agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for
more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns
of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. â?oThe oversight
process has not kept paceâ?"itâ?Ts been coÃ¶ptedâ?? by the
Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding
said. â?oThe process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff weâ?Tre
authorizing.â?? Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had
concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new
operations entail differs from the White Houseâ?Ts. One issue has to do
with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to
potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early
May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in
Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.) The language was
inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior
intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the
Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task
force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under
the Bush Administrationâ?Ts interpretation of the law, clandestine
military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be
depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right
to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.
But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A.
agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local
knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working
with them to direct personnel, matÃ©riel, and money into Iran from an
obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given
only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of
JSOCâ?Ts task-force missions, the pursuit of â?ohigh-value targets,â??
was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization
among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has
conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in
order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing. â?oThis
is a big deal,â?? the person familiar with the Finding said. â?oThe
C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding
does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after
September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never
been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the
military was â?~preparing the battle space,â?T and by using that term
they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is
justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.â?? He added,
â?oThe Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a
shade of grayâ??â?"between operations that had to be briefed to the
senior congressional leadership and those which did notâ?"â?obut now
itâ?Ts a shade of mush.â?? â?oThe agency says weâ?Tre not going to get in
the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,â?? the former
senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal
threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the
rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. â?oThis
drove the military people up the wall,â?? he said. As far as the C.I.A.
was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, â?othe
over-all authorization includes killing, but itâ?Ts not as though
thatâ?Ts what theyâ?Tre setting out to do. Itâ?Ts about gathering
information, enlisting support.â?? The Finding sent to Congress was a
compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the
use of lethal force in ambiguous terms. The defensive-lethal language led
some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their
views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael
V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that
the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces
operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced
capture or harm. The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman
subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that
â?ono lethal action, periodâ?? had been authorized within Iranâ?Ts
borders. As of June, he had received no answer. Members of Congress have
expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the
White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on
the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was
putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and
that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs
unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about
clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had
changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better
coÃ¶peration. â?oThe Executive Branch understands that we are not trying
to dictate what they do,â?? he said in a floor speech at the time. â?oWe
are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with
American values and will not get the country in trouble.â?? Obey declined
to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me
that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with
Congress. He said, â?oI suspect thereâ?Ts something going on, but I
donâ?Tt know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran,
and if he had more time heâ?Td find a way to do it. We still donâ?Tt get
enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence
that they give us information on the edge.â?? None of the four Democrats
in the Gang of Eightâ?"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller
IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyesâ?"would
comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified.
An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his
behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The
notification of a Finding, the aide said, â?ois just thatâ?"notification,
and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing
intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the
intelligence committee.â?? However, Congress does have the means to
challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the
power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of
the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding
can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come
up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A
spokesman for the C.I.A. said, â?oAs a rule, we donâ?Tt comment one way
or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported
findings.â?? The White House also declined to comment.) A member of the
House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic
victory in November, â?oit will take another year before we get the
intelligence activities under control.â?? He went on, â?oWe control the
money and they canâ?Tt do anything without the money. Money is what
itâ?Ts all about. But Iâ?Tm very leery of this Administration.â?? He
added, â?oThis Administration has been so secretive.â?? One irony of
Admiral Fallonâ?Ts departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement
with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working
relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular
communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon
testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was
â?oencouragedâ?? about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding
the role played by Iranâ?Ts leaders, he said, â?oTheyâ?Tve been
absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely donâ?Tt condone any
of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since Iâ?Tve been in
this job in the way of a public action by Iran thatâ?Ts been at all
helpful in this region.â?? Fallon made it clear in our conversations that
he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President,
the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that
people in the White House had been â?ostrugglingâ?? with his views on
Iran. â?oWhen I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every
entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they
decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They
didnâ?Tt know whoâ?Td come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided
that I couldnâ?Tt resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood.
To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and
Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.â?? Fallon told me that his focus
had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but
on â?oputting out the fires in Iraq.â?? There were constant discussions
in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the
subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that â?oit would
happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.â?? Fallonâ?Ts early
retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his
negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the
chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special
Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallonâ?Ts defenders is
retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was
as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a
deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the
Presidentâ?Ts â?oczarâ?? for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. â?oOne of
the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that heâ?Ts
known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the
Pacific,â?? Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S.
forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) â?oHe was charged with coming
up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan,
and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military
operations within his A.O.â??â?"area of operations. â?oThat was not
happening,â?? Sheehan said. â?oWhen Fallon tried to make sense of all the
overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of
responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him
out.â?? The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act,
known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the
President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put
in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training
and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with
other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its
global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional
commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at
military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of
securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain
of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the
White House and the uniformed military. â?oThe coherence of military
strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and
direction of nonconventional military operations,â?? Sheehan said. â?oIf
you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside
the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you
canâ?Tt have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster,
like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.â?? Admiral Fallon, who is known
as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first
Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground
commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that
the Special Operations community would be a concern. â?oFox said that
thereâ?Ts a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him
he had to figure out what they were really doing,â?? Fallonâ?Ts colleague
said. â?oThe Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and
so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special
Ops but for Cheney.â?? The Pentagon consultant said, â?oFallon went down
because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and
you have to admire him for that.â?? In recent months, according to the
Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is
impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A.
activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The
Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force
Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College
and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government,
think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press â?ois very open in
describing the killings going on inside the country,â?? Gardiner said. It
is, he said, â?oa controlled press, which makes it more important that it
publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.â?? He
added, â?oHardly a day goes by now we donâ?Tt see a clash somewhere.
There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the
Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been
killed.â?? Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have
assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government
acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the
southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and
injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it
earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has
been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but,
according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S.,
Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The
agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the
unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlaviâ?"who was overthrown in
1979â?"was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great
effect. â?oThis is the ultimate for the Iraniansâ?"to blame the
C.I.A.,â?? Gardiner said. â?oThis is new, and itâ?Ts an escalationâ?"a
ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows
the people that there is a continuing threat from the â?~Great Satan.â?T
â?? In Gardinerâ?Ts view, the violence, rather than weakening Iranâ?Ts
religious government, may generate support for it. Many of the activities
may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in
the field. One problem with â?opassing moneyâ?? (to use the term of the
person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard
to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the
former senior intelligence official said, â?oWeâ?Tve got exposure,
because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The
Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was
inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without
asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?â?? One possible
consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on
one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a
reason to intervene. A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine
Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international
politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations. â?oJust because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have
ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same
issue,â?? Nasr told me. â?oIran is an old countryâ?"like France and
Germanyâ?"and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is
overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.â?? The minority groups that the
U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal,
without much influence on the government or much ability to present a
political challenge, Nasr said. â?oYou can always find some activist
groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities
will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.â?? The
Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations
in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had
operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi
elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A.
clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and
the Middle East, told me. â?oThe Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who
hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,â??
Baer told me. â?oThese are guys who cut off the heads of
nonbelieversâ?"in this case, itâ?Ts Shiite Iranians. The irony is that
weâ?Tre once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in
Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.â?? Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted
for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the
September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists. One of the
most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the
Jundallah, also known as the Iranian Peopleâ?Ts Resistance Movement,
which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of
Sunnis in Iran. â?oThis is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers
attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,â??
Nasr told me. â?oThey are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they
are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.â?? The Jundallah took
responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard
soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed.
According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups
in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support. The C.I.A. and Special
Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other
dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as
the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in
Kurdistan, or PJAK. The M.E.K. has been on the State Departmentâ?Ts
terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has
received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United
States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon
consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. â?oThe new task
force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for
results.â?? He added, â?oThe M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and
its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If
people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its
bank accountsâ?"and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the
Administration intends.â?? The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been
reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been
operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three
years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and
other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each
of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the
military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of
PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian
targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK
members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the
Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards
and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO,
to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the
group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri
al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced
that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the
M.E.K.â?"a slap at the U.S.â?Ts dealings with the group. Maliki declared
that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations
against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of â?oMalikiâ?Ts
increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the
United States.â?? In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in
the killing of American soldiers, he said, â?oMaliki was unwilling to
play the blame-Iran game.â?? Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed
to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. Americaâ?Ts
covert operations, he said, â?oseem to be harming relations with the
governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the
connection between Tehran and Baghdad.â?? The White Houseâ?Ts reliance on
questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action
inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special
Operations and intelligence communities. JSOCâ?Ts operations in Iran are
believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used
surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of
Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in
Waziristan and Iran are not comparable. In Waziristan, â?othe program
works because itâ?Ts small and smart guys are running it,â?? the former
senior intelligence official told me. â?oItâ?Ts being executed by
professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.â??â?"the Defense
Intelligence Agencyâ?"â?oare right in there with the Special Forces and
Pakistani intelligence, and theyâ?Tre dealing with serious bad guys.â??
He added, â?oWe have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We
have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are
watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific
locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering
until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are
far enough away so they donâ?Tt get hit.â?? One of the most prominent
victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi,
a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in
a missile strike that also killed eleven other people. A dispatch
published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing
number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in
Pakistanâ?Ts tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response,
the Taliban had killed â?odozens of peopleâ?? suspected of providing
information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of
Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies,
and their executionsâ?"a beheading, in one caseâ?"were videotaped and
distributed by DVD as a warning to others. It is not simple to replicate
the program in Iran. â?oEverybodyâ?Ts arguing about the high-value-target
list,â?? the former senior intelligence official said. â?oThe Special Ops
guys are pissed off because Cheneyâ?Ts office set up priorities for
categories of targets, and now heâ?Ts getting impatient and applying
pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in
place.â?? The Pentagon consultant told me, â?oWeâ?Tve had wonderful
results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false
flagsâ?"basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And
weâ?Tre beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White
House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran.
Itâ?Ts one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in
Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size
fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in
Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross
the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO
forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the
Iranian case. All the considerationsâ?"judicial, strategic, and
politicalâ?"are different in Iran.â?? He added, â?oThere is huge
opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a
covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The
leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical
courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy.
Iran is not Waziristan.â?? A Gallup poll taken last November, before the
N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those
surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and
diplomacy to stop Iranâ?Ts nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent
favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as
Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq
has undoubtedly affected the publicâ?Ts tolerance for an attack on Iran.
This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation
became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed
to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of
aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of
Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press
office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship
radio, to â?oexplodeâ?? the American ships. At a White House news
conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to
the Middle East, called the incident â?oprovocativeâ?? and
â?odangerous,â?? and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of
outrage at Iran. â?oTWO MINUTES FROM WARâ?? was the headline in one
British newspaper. The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin
Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning
shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January
7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. â?oYes, itâ?Ts
more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact
with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,â??
Cosgriff said. â?oI didnâ?Tt get the sense from the reports I was
receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.â??
Admiral Cosgriffâ?Ts caution was well founded: within a week, the
Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian
boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports
suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for
sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriffâ?Ts demeanor
angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But
a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea
of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didnâ?Tt do more. The
former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the
Vice-Presidentâ?Ts office. â?oThe subject was how to create a casus belli
between Tehran and Washington,â?? he said. In June, President Bush went
on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and
dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady
of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved
a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians
to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its
enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been
involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the
Administrationâ?Ts essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks
could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have
repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the
diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded
to the new incentives. The continuing impasse alarms many observers.
Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a
syndicated column that it may not â?obe possible to freeze the Iranian
nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military
confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail,
things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.â?? When I spoke to him last
week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community,
said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the
willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a
complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. â?oThe proposal
says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the
other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security
Council,â?? Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its
enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. â?oThis could be
acceptable to the Iraniansâ?"if they have good will.â?? The big question,
Fischer added, is in Washington. â?oI think the Americans are deeply
divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,â?? he said. â?oSome
officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and
others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have
no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.â?? There is
another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has
said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no
â?oself-defeatingâ?? preconditions (although only after diplomatic
groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized
by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann,
the McCain campaignâ?Ts national-security director, as stating that
McCain supports the White Houseâ?Ts position, and that the program be
suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said,
â?ois unilateral cowboy summitry.â?? Scheunemann, who is known as a
neoconservative, is also the McCain campaignâ?Ts most important channel
of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington,
Dick Cheneyâ?Ts chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of
Scheunemannâ?Ts influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain
campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others
say he is someone who isnâ?Tt taken seriously while â?otelling Cheney and
others what they want to hear,â?? as a senior McCain adviser put it. It
is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate
Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in
Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for â?otough and principled
diplomacy.â?? But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the
threat of military action against Iran on the table. âT¦your are always
welcome at the Aitkin County DFL club. meeting at the 40 club on 2nd
tuesday of each month. at 12:15 pmthis page is not affiliated with the
Aitkin county DFL club or the Democratic Party.

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Re: FW: long reading, very disturbing hanse002, July 1 2008
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