Seymour Hersh: U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Mili

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Seymour Hersh: U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, can you explain where the C.I.A. and the Pentagon fits into this picture?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that's actually to me the most interesting part to the story that I wrote, not about Iran, because you can almost argue that, of course, we're doing surveillance. I'm sort of amazed that it became such a big story in the last 24 hours or 36 hours. The real issue is that in -- what the story is about is the fact that the diminuation of the C.I.A. is unbelievable, the President has really gone after the agency with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and at this point, as I say, there's never been more significant or more intellectual or more intelligence capability for not only operations, but for analysis. More is totally centralized in the White House and the Pentagon than since the rise of the national security state after World War II in the Cold War. We now have the White House and a Pentagon that basically dominates the process. The C.I.A. has been marginalized. All of the noise that you heard about the new C.I.A. director, Goss, going after people in the operations division, so-called dirty tricks division, really has masked what's going on. His real mission, his real agenda – and it wasn't his, he was carrying out a White House agenda -- was to get rid of a number of analysts, senior analysts who work for the intelligence side of the C.I.A., old-timers who have been skeptical of many of the White House's and Pentagon's operations, and so, as somebody said to me, they really went after the apostates, and they want only true believers in there. That's what the mission has been. The Pentagon now, under a series of Pentagon -- on the series of presidential formal findings and also just declarations, you know -- I think the President's got a lot of legal power here. The way the world shakes down is this, when it comes to covert secret operations abroad. If the C.I.A. does it, under the law now they must tell the President. The President has to issue a finding approving it, and the Congress has to be told. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to be briefed. If the military does a covert operation, their interpretation of the law is simply that the President's rights as Commander-in-Chief trump any other requirement. That is, the military is there to prepare the battlefield with these operations. This is a military deal, totally. Nothing to do with intelligence. No need to inform anybody. So, now Rumsfeld has won a major bureaucratic fight. He is now operating, as you said in the intro, in up to ten countries. He is sending in covert teams. That is -- the word they use inside is “wiped clean.” The soldiers are wiped clean. Their I.D.’s are totally non-American and non-military. They're going in to make contact with groups inside various countries, set up operations, trying to do some war games, some terrorism themselves. You have to -- you run with the bad boys to find the bad boys is the way somebody said to me. In other words, look like bad boys to attract other bad boys so we find out who they are. We can't find the terrorists too often. This is one way of getting at them. And we're going to be doing that with military people. We're not going to be telling the American ambassador in the country. We’re not going to be telling the C.I.A. station chief. It's going to be done by Rummy and his people. That's a huge shift, an unprecedented shift, in the last 60 years.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/18/1447252

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1. World War IV begins in June, 2005

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2. Who fought WWIII?