- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside
Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets,
The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
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- The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh,
said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer
with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more
suspected sites.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat
that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh,
who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq.
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- "We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole
world has a concern about Iran," Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President
Bush, told CNN's "Late Edition."
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- Of The New Yorker report, he said: "I think it's
riddled with inaccuracies, and I don't believe that some of the conclusions
he's drawing are based on fact."
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- Bartlett said the administration "will continue
to work through the diplomatic initiatives" to convince Iran - which
Bush once called part of an "axis of evil" - not to pursue nuclear
weapons.
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- "No president, at any juncture in history, has
ever taken military options off the table," Bartlett added. "But
what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the
diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now."
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- Commando Task Force
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- Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling
in Iraqi elections.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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