- Leading congressional Democrats have given their approval
to a vastly expanded program of US covert warfare against Iran, according
to an article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, published in the New
Yorker, and made available on the magazine's web site Sunday. (See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
"Preparing the Battlefield-The Bush Administration steps up its secret
moves against Iran")
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- President Bush issued a Presidential Finding, a classified
notification to top congressional leaders about the covert program against
Iran, last year, after the Democrats took control of the Senate and House
of Representatives in the November 2006 elections. The Finding called for
a series of operations, including funding of separatist groups working
among Iran's Arab and Baluchi minorities, as well as the kidnapping of
members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for interrogation across the
border in Iraq and targeting individuals within Iran for assassination.
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- Hersh reports that Bush carried out the legal requirement
that he notify the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate,
as well as the chairman and ranking members of the intelligence committees.
The four Democrats are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, and
House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes.
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- Hersh writes, "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."
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- Nothing of the kind took place. None of the four congressional
Democrats took any steps to forestall the covert action campaign against
Iran, and the $400 million was quietly approved without public notice.
Nor would any of the four comment to Hersh for his June 29 article in the New
Yorker. The Democrats prefer to keep secret their collaboration with the
Bush administration's violations of international law.
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- This revelation demonstrates the complete insincerity
of the "antiwar" posture adopted by the Democrats in the 2006
election and in the current 2008 presidential campaign. While appealing
for the votes of the vast majority of Americans who oppose both the ongoing
war in Iraq and a new war against Iran, the Democrats are quietly preparing
to continue the same policy if, as now seems likely, they regain the White
House in the November election.
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- Hersh seems to suggest a conflict between the congressional
Democrats and the party's presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama. He
writes: "the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words,
some members of the Democratic leadership ... were willing, in secret,
to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed
at Iran, while the Party's presumptive candidate for President, Barack
Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."
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- There is no reason to believe that there is an actual
conflict between Obama and the congressional Democrats over the campaign
of covert action against Iran. It is more a matter of a division of labor.
Obama emphasizes diplomacy and the peaceful resolution of differences,
as part of an electoral campaign aimed at deceiving the American people.
The congressional Democrats, who now share responsibility with the Bush
White House for US government policy, must do what is required to defend
the interests of American imperialism in the region.
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- Obama is already on record as proposing a more aggressive
American military posture in Afghanistan and on the Afghan-Pakistan border,
declaring that he will move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and authorize
cross-border strikes against purported Al Qaeda sites in Pakistan, with
or without the permission of the Pakistani government.
-
- He is also reportedly considering keeping Defense Secretary
Robert Gates at his post in a new Obama administration. The Times of
London wrote Sunday, "Obama's top foreign policy and national security
advisers are pressing the case for keeping Robert Gates at the Pentagon
after he won widespread praise for his performance. The move would be in
keeping with Obama's desire to appoint a cabinet of all the talents."
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- Richard Danzig, a former navy secretary and Obama's top
military adviser, told the newspaper, "My personal position is Gates
is a very good secretary of defense and would be an even better one in
an Obama administration." The newspaper commented that "retaining
Gates would give Obama 'cover' for adjusting his policy" in relation
to the war in Iraq-i.e., to renege on his pledges to end the war and instead
continue the US occupation indefinitely.
-
- Gates has extended his own olive branches to the Democrats,
appointing two former Clinton administration officials to the Defense Policy
Board last year: John Hamre, who was named chairman, and Clinton's former
defense secretary William Perry, who is now among Obama's top national
security advisers. The result is a direct line of communication between
the Pentagon and the Obama campaign.
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- The Hersh article comes amid mounting tensions in the
Middle East, with repeated public threats of military action against Iran
by either Israel or the United States or both, and warnings from Iranian
officials that they will retaliate forcefully against such an assault.
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- Earlier this month the Israeli air force conducted a
full-scale dress rehearsal for air strikes against Tehran, sending warplanes
on a 1,500-kilometer flight against mock targets in the Mediterranean Sea.
Bush administration officials leaked reports on the military exercise to
the media, in a clear attempt to intimidate the Iranian regime, as well
as prepare US and world public opinion for such a strike.
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- Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's
Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's strongest military force, warned
Saturday that in the event of US or Israeli attack, Iran would consider
closing off the sea lanes through the Strait of Hormuz used by tankers
supplying the world with Persian Gulf oil. "Naturally every country
under attack by an enemy uses all its capacity and opportunities to confront
the enemy," he told the Iranian newspaper Jaam-e Jam, according
to the official Fars News Agency.
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- "Iran will definitely act to impose control on the
Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz," he said. "After this action,
the oil price will rise very considerably and this is among the factors
deterring the enemies."
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- Three British newspapers carried reports Sunday of a
further intensification of the war atmosphere:
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- * The Sunday Telegraph interviewed Shabtai
Shavit, a former head of the Israeli secret service Mossad, who suggested
that Israel might strike unilaterally against Iran after the US presidential
election, especially if Senator Barack Obama wins. He suggested that Iran
was a year or less from building its first nuclear weapon, and that Israeli
military action would be driven by that timetable. "The time that
is left ... is getting shorter," he said.
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- * The Guardian reported that Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert held a meeting at his official residence with Aviam
Sela, the organizer of the 1981 Israel airstrike that destroyed the Iraqi
nuclear facility at Osirak, to discuss the practical aspects of a similar
assault on Iran.
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- * The Times of London reported that in response
to these threats, Iran has targeted its most powerful long-range ballistic
missiles, the Shahab-3B, with a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, against
locations in Israel, including the principal Israeli nuclear research facility
at Dimona in the Negev desert.
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- The US covert action campaign inside Iran involves both
the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations
Command, Hersh writes. As in previous exposés by the veteran journalist-the
first to report US war crimes ranging from the My Lai massacre nearly 40
years ago to torture at Abu Ghraib in 2004-his sources are disaffected
sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, particularly in the CIA.
-
- Hersh reports a conflict between the CIA and the White
House over the language in the Presidential Finding, with the CIA demanding
explicit authorization for the use of deadly force by US operatives engaged
in covert action inside Iran, while the White House claimed that Bush's
authority as commander-in-chief was sufficient.
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- One of those interviewed is the former head of the US
Central Command, now-retired Admiral William Fallon, fired by Defense Secretary
Robert Gates earlier this year after a profile in Vanity Fair magazine
depicted Fallon as an in-house opponent of a US war against Iran.
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- Citing comments from several former intelligence and
military officials, Hersh describes an increasingly bitter struggle within
the US government, with the office of Vice President Richard Cheney playing
the lead role in demanding a more aggressive campaign of provocations and
a broader list of targets. One former official told Hersh of a meeting
in the Vice President's office: "The subject was how to create a casus
belli between Tehran and Washington."
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