Is US planning to attack Iran? And Pakistan and Israel are helping US in this plan.
U.S. Said to be Conducting Secret Reconnaissance Missions Inside Iran
Date Posted: Monday, January 17, 2005
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact
An investigative reports states that the U.S. has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since mid-2004, gathering information on nuclear facilities.
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (MASNET & News Agencies) - Teams of U.S. commandos have been operating inside Iran since last summer, selecting suspected weapons sites for possible air strikes, The New Yorker reported.
The government of President George W. Bush has authorized secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since mid-2004, the magazine reports in its Monday edition, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Their goal is to identify target information for up to 26 suspected nuclear, chemical and missile sites, according to the magazine.
The magazine’s award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, wrote that he was repeatedly told by U.S. intelligence and military sources that “the next strategic target was Iran.”
President George W. Bush has signed a series of orders authorizing commando groups to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia, the New Yorker said.
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, reports Reuters news agency.
“The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids,” Hersh wrote.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq, is just one campaign,” a former high-level government intelligence official told the magazine.
“The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah - we’ve got our years, and we want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism,” the official said.
A top government consultant with close ties with the Pentagon told the magazine that the Pentagon civilians - especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and their fellow neo-conservatives - “want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure and possible.”
Hersh said Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld view Bush’s re-election as “a mandate to continue the war on terrorism,” despite problems with the U.S.-led war in Iraq, reports CNN.
“The planning for Iran is going ahead even though Iraq is a mess,” Hersh said to CNN. “I think they really think there’s a chance to do something in Iran, perhaps by summer, to get the intelligence on the sites.”
He added, “The guys on the inside really want to do this.”
Hersh identified those inside people as the “neoconservative” civilian leadership in the Pentagon, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith - “the sort of war hawks that we talk about in connection with the war in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that Iran’s clerical regime could not withstand a military blow and would collapse, the magazine reports.
For its part, Iran has refused to dismantle its nuclear program, which it insists is legal and is intended solely for civilian purposes, reports CNN.
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International allies are helping the Pentagon with its Iran plans, according to the magazine. Israeli consultants are helping develop potential weapons targets inside Iran. Pakistan is also involved.
Pakistani scientists are providing information to an American task force that is penetrating eastern Iran searching for underground nuclear installations, the magazine said.
In exchange for this cooperation, an 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, reports Reuters.
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The New Yorker article went on to describe how the Bush White House has solidified control over U.S. intelligence operations and how the Pentagon has finagled new powers to conduct covert operations without oversight from the U.S. Congress or involvement by the CIA.
The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed Hersh’s report, reports Reuters.
White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett on Sunday called the Hersh article “riddled with inaccuracies and I don’t believe that some of the conclusions he’s drawing are based on fact.”
He said the administration was using diplomacy to address the Iran issue.
“We’re working with our European allies to help convince the Iranian government to not pursue weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons. We’ll continue to work through the IAEA protocol to do just that,” Bartlett said.
He was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.
“We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran,” Dan Bartlett, a top aide to Bush, told CNN’s “Late Edition.”
“It’s critical that the entire world focus on this issue. It is a threat that we have to take seriously, and we’ll continue to work through the diplomatic initiatives that he set forth,” said Bartlett.
“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.”
But Hersh said administration hawks were convinced European negotiations will fail, and when they do, the United States will act - possibly by mid-year.
“The next step is Iran. It’s definitely there. They’re definitely planning,” Hersh told CNN.
In the meantime, the Pentagon is trying to get reliable information on Iranian weapon sites, to avoid the embarrassment of the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
Last week, the effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - the Bush administration’s stated primary rationale for the war - was halted after having come up empty, reports CNN.
“We don’t want another WMD flap. We want to be sure we have the right information,” he said.
in that case they cudve created some other story which would have been more believable than this 
coz the Islamic Republic of Pakistan will never attack our brother country Islamic Republic of Iran 
