With regard to Iran

Quoted material from Seymour Hersh’s new article, The Coming Wars, published this week in The New Yorker.

What: “We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy.”

How: 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...."The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress"..."They’re not even going to tell the CINCs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “the objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

Where: The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible...”

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or 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.

“Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat....A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)
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With all these presidential findings and executive orders, who needs Congress? The Pentagon can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, wherever it wants, and never has to consult with Congress or anyone else. What a deal for Rummy, the kind of guy I’m so eager to trust after the fabulous job he’s done in screwing up Iraq, now the primo terrorist training ground in the world. But of course, according to Bush, that’s all water under the bridge now. The election was an accountability moment and he won it. All that accountability is so last year.

So, evidently, it’s on to Iran where blowing up the military infrastructure is sure to encourage the populace to throw rose petals at our feet, the same as they did in Iraq. Perish the thought that they might, instead, rally around their own flag and fight back, which is, oddly enough, a rather normal reaction to being invaded.

And death squads? That’s real American can-do.

Is that what we want to be? I sure don’t want any part of it.

I still have a thing for checks and balances and accountability. I like government oversight. It has served us pretty well in the past. Except for when it has been circumvented. This is a bad plan. Really bad. It’s not the way we should be doing business. It’s wrong. I hate what this Administration is turning us into.