U.S. conducting secret missions inside Iran-report
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16248289.htm
Source: Reuters 16 Jan 2005
WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The United States has been conducting
secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential
nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine
reported on Sunday.
The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret
missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal
of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected
sites.
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the
Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into
Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker,
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The
Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next,
we're going to have the Iranian campaign."
The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be
taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year
exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a
concern about Iran," Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President George W.
Bush, told CNN's "Late Edition."
Of The New Yorker report, he said: "I think it's riddled with
inaccuracies, and I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's
drawing are based on fact."
Bartlett said the administration "will continue to work through the
diplomatic initiatives" to convince Iran -- which Bush once called
part of an "axis of evil" -- not to pursue nuclear weapons.
"No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military
options off the table," Bartlett added. "But what President Bush has
shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives
that are underway right now."
COMMANDO TASK FORCE
Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi
elections.
The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando
task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani
scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information
from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for
underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his
government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father
of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in
selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret
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 10 nations in the Middle
East and South Asia."
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh
reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal
restrictions imposed on the CIA's covert activities overseas
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16248289.htm
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