Page 2 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA A bombshell that nobody
heard By Tom Engelhardt
giant, collective shrug of the US
media's rather scrawny shoulders.
Since
the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been
so tepid in places where it should count, let me
take up just a few of the many issues his report
raises.
'Meddling' in Iran For
at least a month, the US press and television news
have been full to the brim with mile-high
headlines and top-of-the-news
stories recounting (and, more
rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of
Iranian "interference" or "meddling" in Iraq
(where US military spokesmen regularly refer to
the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as
"anti-Iraq forces").
Since Hersh published
"Plan B" in The New Yorker in June 2004 in which
he claimed that the Israelis were "running covert
operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and
Syria", he has been on the other side of this
story.
In "The coming wars" in January
2005, he first reported that the Bush
administration, like the Israelis, had been
"conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside
Iran at least since" the summer of 2004. Last
April in "The Iran plans", he reported that the
administration was eager to put the "nuclear
option" on the table in any future air assault on
Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the
Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least
temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use
of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran).
He
also reported that US combat units were "on the
ground" in Iran, marking targets for any future
air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as
claiming that they were also "working with
minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in
the north, the Balochis, in the southeast, and the
Kurds, in the northeast. 'The troops are studying
the terrain, and giving away walking-around money
to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local
tribes and shepherds,' the consultant said. One
goal is to get 'eyes on the ground' ... The
broader aim, the consultant said, is to 'encourage
ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime."
In "The redirection", he now claims that
in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime
change, "American military and special-operations
teams have escalated their activities in Iran to
gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon
consultant on terrorism and the former senior
intelligence official, have also crossed the
[Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian operatives
from Iraq."
In his Democracy Now!
radio interview, he added: "We have been
deeply involved with Azeris and Balochis and
Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the
country ... and, of course, the Israelis have been
involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan ...
Iran has been having sort of a series of back-door
fights, the Iranian government, because ... they
have a significant minority population. Not
everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the
Azeris and Balochis and Kurds, you're really
30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country."
In addition, he reported that "a special
planning group has been established in the offices
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with
creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that
can be implemented, upon orders from the
president, within 24 hours" and that its "new
assignment" was to identify not just nuclear
facilities and possible regime-change targets, but
"targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying
or aiding militants in Iraq".
Were there
nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of
this would still have been significant news - if
we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial
planet in which Iranian "interference" in
(American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret US
operations in, and military plans to devastate,
Iran are your basic ho-hum issue.
America's mainstream news purveyors don't
generally consider the issue of the United States'
"interference" in Iran worthy of a great deal of
reporting, nor do US pundits consider it a topic
worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a
Congress where leading Democrats have regularly
outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish
positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an
issue.
You can read abroad about rumored
US operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan
aimed at unsettling Iranian minorities such as the
Balochs and about possible operations to create
strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near
the Iraqi border - the Iranians seem to blame the
British, whose troops are in southern Iraq, for
some of this (a charge vociferously denied by the
British Embassy in Tehran) - but it's not a topic
of great interest in the US.
In recent
months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in
minority regions of Iran. These explosions have
been reported in the US, but you would be
hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to
say about them, and the possibility that any of
these might prove part of a US (or Anglo-American)
covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian
fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern
the news mind, even though history says it should.
After all, many of the United States'
present Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly
traced back to the successful
CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust
prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had
nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install
young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power as shah.
After all, in the 1980s, in the
anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the
eager connivance of the Pakistanis and the Saudis)
helped organize, arm and fund the Islamic
extremists who would some day turn on the US for
terror campaigns on a major scale.
As
Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost
Wars, [1] for instance, "Under ISI [Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence] direction, the
mujahideen received training and malleable
explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb
attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually
designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders.
[CIA director William] Casey endorsed these
despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."
Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq
National Accord, an organization run by the CIA's
Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently
planted, under the agency's direction, car bombs
and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a
movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to
destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime. The New York
Times reported this on its front page in June 2004
(to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the
prime minister of US-occupied Iraq.
Who
knows where the funding, training and equipment
for the bombings in Iran are coming from - but, at
a moment when
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
