Hersh blows open story on US covert aid reaching al-Qaida groups
Sunday, February 25th, 2007Iran-contra redux, this time with radical Sunni enemies of Iran & Hezbollah; trouble is, these radicals are of the same strain as those responsible for the 9/11 plot
Click image for mp4 video of entire Hersh interview on CNN Late Edition for February 25 (quicktime plugin recommended, 50 MB download, about 3-5 minute delay with minimum 2 Mbit connection, not recommended for dial-up. Think Progress has a Flash excerpt that will play faster.)
Seymour Hersh has a new article in The New Yorker magazine. This one is a real blockbuster. In it Hersh writes that he has learned from confidential sources that off-the-books aid to anti-Iran, anti-Hezbollah factions in the Lebanon’s Siniora government—possibly diverted from swampy Iraq slush funds—is making its way to “the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south.”
Hersh writes that these groups “are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.”
Furthermore, concerning former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte,
I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)
The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.
Wow. Negoponte–a guy who had little compunction about running death squads out of the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa during the 1980s, or helping implement the “Salvador option” for Iraq–is the moralist who can’t sanction the activities emanating from the Veep’s office. Cheney seems to have thrown down the covert gauntlet, daring someone to stop him. I think that spate of articles a few months ago suggesting Vice President Crooked Scowl’s diminished power were premature.
In a wide-ranging interview today with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition, Hersh discussed plans long underway for an attack on Iran. I found this item to be quite interesting:
Well, I don’t think there’s any question but much of the senior military leadership do not think it’s the wise thing to do. Of course, if the president orders it, it will happen. But they are very skeptical.
For example, I was told — I hinted at it in the article — that we could have a carrier in trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. There’s very little room to maneuver, and a carrier, when it’s recovering planes that are, you know, landing after attacking and trying to recover the planes, their motions, their movements are predictable. They have to have the wind in a certain direction. They could be vulnerable to attack.
Iran has hundreds of PT boats they can load up and make them more or less suicide boats. So the Navy is extremely worried about that possibility. We could have some serious damage to our fleet. And also, what’s Iran going to do in response?
I will tell you also that there’s a lot of evidence — I didn’t get into this that much into the piece — that the Iranians are digging more holes, moving their leadership into underground bunkers in other places besides Tehran in case of a bombing. They are anticipating the worst.
Big questions now are: Will any other media pick this up? Will Congress take any interest in the Pentagon’s evidently extremely deep, extremely murky covert operations?