warinner (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} warinner) wrote,@ 2008-07-10 12:00:00 |
|
Bomb Iran, Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Bomb Iran
Excuse me, I was just doing my John McCain impression.
So Seymour Hersh came out with another investigation of the coming attack on Iran. Terry Gross devoted a whole hour to interviewing Hersh about his New Yorker piece.
I have a hard time with Hersh. There are not many, maybe even no other, investigative journalists that have a record like his: Pulitzer Prize for breaking the My Lai massacre, KAL 007, Israeli nukes, Project Jennifer, doing a lot of the initial reporting on Abu Ghraib (but not all), to name a few scoops.
Lately Hersh has made US saber rattling against Iran his beat.
Hersh's scoop this time was that Congressional and Senate leaders had green lighted Presidential Finding authorizing spending up to 400 million dollars to destabilize Iran and allowed US operatives to use deadly force on the ground in Iran in capturing "high-value targets" and remove them to Iraq for detention and interrogation.
For Hersh, it all looks a lot like the march to war against Iraq, another attempt to hoodwink the U.S. into another disastrous war. But is it?
There a lot of different ways to look at the inauguration of clandestine campaign against Iran:
- It is angling for a casus belli.
- It is just business as usual in the War on Terror and they are just going after The Bad Guys.
- It is trying to turn up the pressure on Iran to back off its support of Iraqi insurgents.
- It is trying to turn up the pressure on Iran to negotiate on the nuclear impasse.
- It is trying to obtain information on Iran's nuke program.
- All of the above more or less.
But Hersh has not really nailed down what the Bushies are trying to do. While the "lethal force" clauses of the finding, Cheney cranking out lists of Iranian "high value targets" are juicy, from a journalistic point of view, they aren't the same as figuring out what Bush and Cheney are after.
While Hersh got wind of the finding and some of contents, he didn't dig up much on what the actual operations are, much less what objectives they are meant to achieve.
Hersh buries not one, but two leads in the article.
The first lead is that the Presidential finding is just another end run around Congressional oversight. The finding and approval process applies only to skulduggery involving the CIA but not to skulduggery carried out by the military, so the White House argues. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is immune from Congress looking over its shoulder since Bush is the Commander in Chief.
The cloak and dagger ops in Iran are a joint CIA and DOD (and who knows what other agency) operation. So the $400 million budget presumably doesn't fund the whole campaign. And nobody, including Hersh, has any clear idea what the JSOC operatives are getting up to either.
The second lead is that the Bushies gave the heave-ho to yet another uppity senior military officer.
This time it was Admiral William Fallon, former head of Central Command, the military area responsible for that fun-filled part of the world including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
Fallon had the temerity to ask questions about what kind of JSOC operations where being carried under his command and tangled with the Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney. Fallon lost and got the consolation prize of early retirement.
Has there ever been an Administration so actively hostile to its senior military? How many general officers have they shunted off into obscurity for not following the party line? Bush has done outdone Truman sacking MacArthur several times over.
Hersh has always got himself in trouble with his public statement and his writing. Hersh's article is measured and meaty. His performance on Fresh Air was alarmist. Hersh drops the qualifications and specifics when speaking. When I listen to Hersh, I have a mental image of Jason Robards in "All the President's Men" saying "It feels thin." Hersh needs a verbal editor.
Excuse me, I was just doing my John McCain impression.
So Seymour Hersh came out with another investigation of the coming attack on Iran. Terry Gross devoted a whole hour to interviewing Hersh about his New Yorker piece.
I have a hard time with Hersh. There are not many, maybe even no other, investigative journalists that have a record like his: Pulitzer Prize for breaking the My Lai massacre, KAL 007, Israeli nukes, Project Jennifer, doing a lot of the initial reporting on Abu Ghraib (but not all), to name a few scoops.
Lately Hersh has made US saber rattling against Iran his beat.
Hersh's scoop this time was that Congressional and Senate leaders had green lighted Presidential Finding authorizing spending up to 400 million dollars to destabilize Iran and allowed US operatives to use deadly force on the ground in Iran in capturing "high-value targets" and remove them to Iraq for detention and interrogation.
For Hersh, it all looks a lot like the march to war against Iraq, another attempt to hoodwink the U.S. into another disastrous war. But is it?
There a lot of different ways to look at the inauguration of clandestine campaign against Iran:
- It is angling for a casus belli.
- It is just business as usual in the War on Terror and they are just going after The Bad Guys.
- It is trying to turn up the pressure on Iran to back off its support of Iraqi insurgents.
- It is trying to turn up the pressure on Iran to negotiate on the nuclear impasse.
- It is trying to obtain information on Iran's nuke program.
- All of the above more or less.
But Hersh has not really nailed down what the Bushies are trying to do. While the "lethal force" clauses of the finding, Cheney cranking out lists of Iranian "high value targets" are juicy, from a journalistic point of view, they aren't the same as figuring out what Bush and Cheney are after.
While Hersh got wind of the finding and some of contents, he didn't dig up much on what the actual operations are, much less what objectives they are meant to achieve.
Hersh buries not one, but two leads in the article.
The first lead is that the Presidential finding is just another end run around Congressional oversight. The finding and approval process applies only to skulduggery involving the CIA but not to skulduggery carried out by the military, so the White House argues. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is immune from Congress looking over its shoulder since Bush is the Commander in Chief.
The cloak and dagger ops in Iran are a joint CIA and DOD (and who knows what other agency) operation. So the $400 million budget presumably doesn't fund the whole campaign. And nobody, including Hersh, has any clear idea what the JSOC operatives are getting up to either.
The second lead is that the Bushies gave the heave-ho to yet another uppity senior military officer.
This time it was Admiral William Fallon, former head of Central Command, the military area responsible for that fun-filled part of the world including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
Fallon had the temerity to ask questions about what kind of JSOC operations where being carried under his command and tangled with the Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney. Fallon lost and got the consolation prize of early retirement.
Has there ever been an Administration so actively hostile to its senior military? How many general officers have they shunted off into obscurity for not following the party line? Bush has done outdone Truman sacking MacArthur several times over.
Hersh has always got himself in trouble with his public statement and his writing. Hersh's article is measured and meaty. His performance on Fresh Air was alarmist. Hersh drops the qualifications and specifics when speaking. When I listen to Hersh, I have a mental image of Jason Robards in "All the President's Men" saying "It feels thin." Hersh needs a verbal editor.
