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May 07, 2007
Ho-Hum, Yet More Evidence Of Covert Action Inside Iran
From the new Atlantic article about Condoleezza Rice:
Rice and her colleagues in the administration decided to embark on a daring and risky third course: a coordinated campaign, directed with the help of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. While the “get tough” crew favored direct military action against Iran, the administration chose a more subtle mix of diplomatic and economic pressure, large-scale military exercises, psychological warfare, and covert operations. The bill for the covert part of this activity, which has involved funding sectarian political movements and paramilitary groups in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, is said to amount to more than $300 million. It is being paid by Saudi Arabia and other concerned Gulf states, for whom the combination of a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq and a nuclear-armed Iran means trouble...Sources in the United States and the Middle East familiar with the covert side of the American-led effort to “push back” Iran...pointed to an upsurge in antigovernment guerrilla activity inside Iran, including a bomb in Zahedan, the economic center of the province of Baluchistan, that killed 11 soldiers in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on February 14; the mysterious death of the Iranian scientist Ardashir Hosseinpour, who worked on uranium enrichment at the Isfahan nuclear facility; and the defection of a high-ranking Iranian general named Ali Asgari, a former deputy minister of defense who was also the Revolutionary Guard officer responsible for training and supplying Hezbollah during its war against the Israelis in southern Lebanon in the 1980s. Iran’s oil infrastructure may be another likely target. “People focus altogether on the nuclear facilities and how difficult they would be to take out,” former Secretary of State George Shultz told me in his office at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “But it’s not difficult for somebody to sabotage those refineries.”
Hey, let's ask Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, what he's doing about these massively illegal actions that could easily lead to war...accidently or on purpose. Jay?
ROCKEFELLER: Don't you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I'm Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.
Oh! Sorry, I didn't realize that as a senior U.S. senator with an $82 million personal fortune, you were completely powerless—so much so that you can't even find out things that someone writing an article for the Atlantic can. Carry on.
Posted at May 7, 2007 08:07 AM | TrackBackWhy would a rattlesnake commit suicide? Easy... They don't. These assholes would have us believe that Iran would actually give US the keys to their kingdom by getting involved with that mess.
Anyone knows that Iraq has taken care of itself as far as raising hell for us goes. So I don't see the hub-bub at all. Iran has *NO, I repeat, NO* incentive to aid the Iraqi insurgency, at least not anymore now that we have essntially been defeated.
The reality is that S.A., Egypt, Jordan and Syria are arming the insurgency and there's nothing the U.S. can do about it. Plain and simple. Now let's move on to a topic with factual basis please...
Oh wait this is the Bush Era; I am sorry!
Posted by: at May 7, 2007 09:09 AMOh, I get it, Rockefeller is trying to tell us that it is just too complicated for us to understand. We should all just go back to playing with our beanie-copters and little red wagons and leave this complicated foreign policy stuff to real adults like Rockefeller. We would never ever understand that Gramps Rockefeller started the Standard Oil Company and of course oil has nothing to do with any of this, just too complicated.
Posted by: rob payne at May 7, 2007 10:14 AMRockefeller is without question the most obvious of right wing political plants in the Democratic Party next to Joe Lieberman. His entire political career is based on discrediting and sabotaging the Democratic Party and the so-called "liberal power structure" it currently houses.
Basically, the guy is Strom Thurmond circa 1963.
Posted by: at May 7, 2007 10:40 AMRockefeller went all out to ensure Pat Roberts didn't turn the Intelligence Committee into a firewall for the Bush administration.
Good work Senator.
Posted by: Mike at May 7, 2007 11:30 AMAnd aren't we fortunate to live in a country where only irredeemable anti-Semites and other enemies of Israel would even notice that there might be an Israeli (right) 'angle' to any of this...
Posted by: Mike at May 7, 2007 11:58 AMAnd we have Bigtime off on a "diplomatic tour" of...yes, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, countries already counted in the "Iran pushback" scheme. Cheney is clearly the driving force in this effort to rally anti-Iranian covert action, regardless of what is written about Condi's alleged role. Saudis supply the money, US the muscle, full stop.
Posted by: barrisj at May 7, 2007 01:20 PMAnd AIPAC and rest of the Israel Lobby, barrisj? Are they gonna chop the political liver out of any "feller" who gets in Dick's "diplomatic" way?
Or was that just a rhetorical question?
"We," hf?
You had something to do with that? You're traveling with the Queen? What do you mean "we"?
Israel wants people to believe they have the power to fight Iran humanely. One word: Laughable.
If Israel wanted to destroy the Islamic world it could, but it doesn't knowing well it would be the end of their precious victimhood (thus their credibility entirely) they've banked off of for decades.
I love that term, Anti-Semite. Especially when it is used to refer to people defending Arab rights in the land they've peacefully tended and prospered in for centuries(modern-day Israel)alongside the Jews.
Arabs are Semetic to you fucking morons!!!!
Both deserve respect, honor and peace.
Posted by: at May 7, 2007 02:47 PMJewish hatred for anything not Jewish should be as well documented as the hatred aimed their way. A considerable portion of which is the direct or indirect result of the former.
It's only factual (fair).
[Mr. [], I appreciate your desire to share your unpleasant creepiness with the world. But there may be better places to get the word out than here. Thanks--Jon]
Posted by: at May 7, 2007 02:50 PMsomething is missing from this and other stories concerning US covert operations in Iran
i recall that following the release of the US embassy hostages, the US government signed an agreement (The Iranian Hostage Agreement under International and United States Law), brokered by Algeria, with Iran that included a promise NOT to take any covert action in Iran
the admission of ongoing US sponsored subversive activity in Iran a violation of that agreement!!!
Posted by: theDdoubleSstandard at May 7, 2007 04:07 PMIt might be a little hazardous to Rockefeller's 82$ million personal fortune to tick off both the Saudis and AIPAC by looking too closely at what the Sunnis and Israelis are doing. The Cheney administration isn't the only enemy out there.
Posted by: Agent Smith at May 7, 2007 04:56 PMLove the censorship Jonny Boy. I guess I am the white guy preaching on 51st and Mobley in Chicago.
If telling the truth about the West AND their all too loyal allies (Israel) constitutes unpleasant creepiness, then so be it. I apologize for your ignorance. Sucker.
Posted by: at May 7, 2007 07:12 PMthere's nothing technically covert about having 2 and possibly 3 carriers in the persian gulf waiting to rain down hellfires on the Irani populace(see couple of posts down).
it's only covert because they don't report it on CNN with those flashy graphics and what not. of course when the invasion starts, nobody will think to question how, why or when the carriers got there in the first place cause they dont exactly zip along the water.
Posted by: almostinfamous at May 7, 2007 08:55 PMMaybe Jay doesn't want to know, investigations and all coming down the line.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at May 7, 2007 09:47 PMInvasion of Iran? Wow, Americans are truly an irrevocably brainwashed people. An attack on Iran is really just an attack on Moscow and Beijing. They are reflexive entities, period.
Do any of you fools realize that an invasion of Iran would almost certainly provoke if not implore Russia to attack with their full capacity? Which is quite a capacity indeed from the demonstration film I have seen.
Aircraft, the U.S's main if not only advantage, is nothing when it is burning in cinder in the sky.
Posted by: at May 8, 2007 09:40 AMAnd no one in the world is better at shooting down aircraft than the Russkies.
Posted by: at May 8, 2007 09:43 AM
