I am sure this will be cited all over the place. It is scary as hell. Unbelievable, really, but Seymour Hersh is rarely wrong. A few selections from his article in the most recent New Yorker. Read the whole thing either in the New Yorker, or get it at Truthout (see link below).
2005http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011805A.shtml
The Coming Wars:
What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
24-31 January 2005 Issue
George W. Bush's re-election was not his only victory last
fall. The President 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-Second World
War national-security state. 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. The C.I.A. will continue to
be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one
government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it,
as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and
Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the
Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range
policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of
democracy throughout the region. Bush's re-election is
regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's
support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the
position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian
leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul
Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas
Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former
high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after
the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had
been heard and the American people did not accept their
message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to
staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one
campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge
war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me.
"Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've
declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the
enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want
to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is
Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has
absorbed much of the public criticism when things went
wrong-whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack
of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in Iraq. Both
Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for
Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the
military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense
Secretary was never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the
second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence
and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been
determined before the Presidential election, and much of it
would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism
would be expanded, and effectively placed under the
Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of
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
ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the
operations off the books-free from legal restrictions imposed
on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities
overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and
reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees.
(The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the
nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and
attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon
doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the
former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even
call it 'covert ops'-it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In
their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going
to tell the cincs"-the regional American military
commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the
White House did not respond to requests for comment on this
story.)....
In my interviews, I 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
intelligence official told me. "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 pissants.' No loose ends,
and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there."
In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a
much harsher view. 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. "We're not dealing with a set of
National Security Council option papers here," the former
high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already
passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything
against Iran. They're doing it."
The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or
at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear. But
there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The
government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon,
in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on
Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the
religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a
struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic
movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of
invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it
the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will
collapse"-like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East
Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
share that belief, he said.
"The idea that an American attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely ill
informed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who
worked on the National Security Council in the Bush
Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear
ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum,
and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on
their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern
nation that's technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is
now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East
Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American
attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash
against the United States and a rallying around the regime."
