Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the
financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and
the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding
congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of
Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of
money," possibly stolen from the
billions of Iraqi oil dollars that
have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some
of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through
the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister
Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to
al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo
and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim
Brotherhood.
All of this was being done as part of a "sea
change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at
rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as
Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government -- and launching secret
operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above.
Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with
Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror),
despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran,
that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the
Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may
be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.
Imagine.
All this and much more (including news of U.S. military
border-crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow George W.
Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24-hours
notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of
four U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to the
President in the Persian Gulf) was revealed, often in remarkable
detail, just over a week ago in
"The Redirection," a Seymour Hersh
piece in the New Yorker. Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai
story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent
years, from the
Abu Ghraib scandal on, he has consistently released
explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration.
Imagine,
in addition, that
Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air,
Hardball
with Chris Matthews, and
CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and
actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on
the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offenses,
if they do indeed reach up to the Vice President or President.
Now
imagine the response: Front-page headlines; editorials nationwide
calling for answers, Congressional hearings, or even the appointment of
a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed
page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions,
demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold
reporters from a recently freed media standing up in White House and
Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on
Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and
investigations into why the people's representatives were left so
totally out of this loop.
Uh…
All I can say is: If any
of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I can
tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or
the possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being
run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and Saudi money, out
of the Vice President's office. You can certainly
find a few pieces on,
or reports about, "The Redirection" -- all focused only on the possible
build-up to a war with Iran -- and the
odd wire-service mention of it;
but nothing major, nothing Earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact,
a single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no
journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; no
Congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for investigations or
hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an expression of fear
somewhere that we might be seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own
moment.
This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable
non-response to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress,
the media, and the nation. Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces
generally arrive un-sourced and filled with anonymous officials ("a
former senior intelligence official," "a U.S. government consultant
with close ties to Israel"). Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his
sources in the Intelligence Community and the military to striking
effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing makes it harder for other
reporters to follow-up, though when it comes to papers like the
Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that they might
have Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims. And,
of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, Congressional
representatives, and reporters at administration news briefings don't
need to do any footwork at all to raise these subjects. (Consider, for
instance, the
White House press briefing on April 10, 2006, where a
reporter did indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker
piece.) As far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of
Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it was inaccurate or
off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug of the
media's rather scrawny shoulders.
Since the response to
Hersh's remarkable piece has been so tepid in places where it should
count, let me take up just a few of the many issues his report raises.
"Meddling" in Iran
For
at least a month now, our press and TV news have been full to the brim
with mile-high headlines and top-of-the-news stories recounting (and,
more rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of Iranian
"interference" or "meddling" in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen
regularly refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as "anti-Iraq
forces"). Since Hersh published
"Plan B" in the New Yorker in June 2004
in which he claimed that the Israelis were "running covert operations
inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria," he has been on the other side
of this story.
In
"The Coming Wars" in January of 2005, he
first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had
been "conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least
since" the summer of 2004. In
April of 2006 in "The Iran Plans," he
reported that the Bush administration was eager to put the "nuclear
option" on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear
facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at
least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear
bunker-busters in Iran). He also reported that American combat units
were "on the ground" in Iran, marking targets for any future air
attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also
"working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the
north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast.
The troops ‘are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around
money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and
shepherds,' the consultant said. One goal is to get ‘eyes on the
ground'… The broader aim, the consultant said, is to ‘encourage ethnic
tensions' and undermine the regime."
In "The Redirection," he
now claims that, in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime
change, "American military and special-operations teams have escalated
their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a
Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence
official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian
operatives from Iraq." In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added:
"[W]e have been deeply involved with Azeris and Baluchis and Iranian
Kurds in terror activities inside the country… and, of course, the
Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan… Iran
has been having sort of a series of backdoor fights, the Iranian
government, because… they have a significant minority population. Not
everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Baluchis and
Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country."
In
addition, he reported that "a special planning group has been
established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with
creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented,
upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours," and that its
"new assignment" was to identify not just nuclear facilities and
possible regime-change targets, but "targets in Iran that may be
involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq."
Were there
nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have
been significant news -- if we didn't happen to live on a one-way
imperial planet in which Iranian "interference" in (American) Iraq is
an outrage, but secret U.S. operations in, and military plans to
devastate, Iran are your basic ho-hum issue. Our mainstream news
purveyors don't generally consider the issue of our "interference" in
Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do our pundits consider
it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a Congress
where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush
administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much
of an issue.
You can read abroad about
rumored American
operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian
minorities like the Baluchis and about
possible operations to create
strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border --
the Iranians seem to blame the British, whose troops are in southern
Iraq, for some of this (
a charge vociferously denied by the British
embassy in Tehran) -- but it's not a topic of great interest here.
In
recent months, in fact,
several bombs have gone off in
minority regions
of Iran. These explosions have been reported here, but you would be
hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to say about them, and
the possibility that any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or
Anglo-American) covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian
fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern the news mind here,
even though past history says it should. After all, many of our present
Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the
Anglo-American ur-moment in the Middle East, the successful
CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust Prime Minister Mohammad
Mossadegh (who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install
the young Shah in power.
After all, in the 1980s, in the
anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of
the Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm, and fund the
Islamic extremists who would someday turn on us for terror campaigns on
a major scale. As
Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars,
for instance, "Under ISI [Pakistani intelligence] direction, the
mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb
and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed
to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA Director William] Casey
endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."
Similarly,
in the early 1990s, the
Iraq National Accord, an organization run by
the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently planted, under
the Agency's direction, car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad
(including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize
Saddam Hussein's regime. The
New York Times reported this on its front
page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the Prime
Minister of American-occupied Iraq.
Who knows where the
funding, training, and equipment for the bombings in Iran are coming
from -- but, at a moment when charges that the Iranians are sending
into Iraq advanced IEDs, or the means to produce them, are the rage, it
seems a germane subject.
In this country, it's a no-brainer
that the Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their people, overtly
or covertly, into neighboring Iraq, a country which, back in the 1980s,
invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, resulting in
perhaps a million casualties; but it's just normal behavior for the
Pentagon to have traveled halfway across the planet to dominate the
Iraqi military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases,
build the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and
send special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well)
across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do
"reconnaissance" or even to foment unrest among its minorities. This is
the definition of an imperial worldview.
Sleepless Nights
Let's
leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other matters
highlighted in "The Redirection" that certainly should have raised the
odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm button here at home far more than
his Iranian news (which did at least get some attention):
1.
Iran-Contra Redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under the leadership
of Elliot Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two
counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress and was
later pardoned), such a meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm
that this happened? Does no one want to know who attended? Iran-Contra
alumni in the Bush administration at one time or another included
former Reagan National Security Advisor
John Poindexter, Otto
Reich,
John
Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as Director
of National Intelligence in order to avoid the twenty-first century
version of Iran-Contra -- "No way. I'm not going down that road again,
with the N.S.C. [National Security Council] running operations off the
books, with no [presidential] finding."),
Roger Noriega, and Robert
Gates. Did the Vice President or President sit in? Was either of them
informed about the "lessons drawn"? Were the Vice President's
right-hand men, I. Lewis Libby and/or David Addington in any way
involved? Who knows? In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan
administration drew together the seediest collection of freelance arms
dealers, intelligence agents, allies, and -- in the case of Ayatollah
Khomeini's Iranian regime -- sworn enemies in what can only be called
"amateur hour" at the White House. Now, it looks like the Bush
administration is heading down a similar path and, given its previous
"amateur hour" reputation in foreign policy, imagine what this is
likely to mean.
2.
Jihadis as Proxies: Using jihadis as
American proxies in a struggle to rollback Iran -- with the help of the
Saudis -- should have rung a few bells somewhere in American memory as
another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s -- on the theory
that my enemy's enemy is my friend -- the fundamentalist Catholic CIA
Director William Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists
could prove tight and trustworthy allies in rolling back the Soviet
Union. In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudis
royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni Islam,
regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the mujahedeen ready
to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the results? Today, according to
Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring key figures in the administration that
this time they have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under
control. No problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.
3.
Congress in the Dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of Saudi
National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy to the Bushes
and Dick Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the people running the
black-ops programs out of Cheney's office have managed to run circles
around any possibility of Congressional oversight, leaving the
institution completely "in the dark," which is undoubtedly exactly
where Congress wanted to be for the last six years. Is this still true?
The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging.
To
summarize, if Hersh is to be believed -- and as a major journalistic
figure for the last near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken
seriously -- the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst
mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in
Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in
our history. Given what we already know about the Bush administration,
Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as
well as down the line. For Congress, the media, and Americans in
general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a
shout for an all-nighter with NoDoz.
In my childhood, one of
the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which
some poor soul in a perilous situation -- say, clinging to the ledge of
a tall building -- would be screaming for help, while passersby were so
engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the
opposite situation. A journalist essentially writing bloody murder in a
giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the
mainstream evidently cares -– not yet anyway -- to pay the slightest
attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a
damn. Think
Kitty Genovese on a giant scale.
Writings 
Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor 
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