Journalist (Seymour Hersh): U.S. planning for possible attack on Iran.

CNN ^ | Jan. 16, 2005 | CNN

[FairOpinion]

The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

The effort has been under way at least since last summer, Hersh said on CNN's "Late Edition."

In an interview on the same program, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said the story was "riddled with inaccuracies."

"I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact," Bartlett said.

He said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources who divulged it in the hope that publicity would force the administration to reconsider.

[windchime]

"That one quote sounds like Hersh doesn't like people asking about his background--might raise questions he'd rather not answer, evidently."

You're welcome!

I think you're right.  Additional info on his background:

A Ghost In The Iraqi Prison  Front Page Magazine 5-14-04

Abu Ghraib’s Kitty Kelley  National Review Online   9-17-04

Seem to remember reading on this forum (somewhere in the 'Kerry files') speculation that Kerry provided  information that influenced his writing of 'My Lai Massacre', but I haven't found it yet.

[Fedora]

Thanks for the links. I hadn't heard that Kerry himself provided information on My Lai [Hersh says in an interview that "I learned about the My Lai massacre on a tip from Geoffrey Cowan, who later became head of the Voice of America early in the Clinton Administration. At the time he was a lawyer working with military deserters" (https://secure.progressive.org/intv1098.html)]--but the group funding Hersh's My Lai expose, Dispatch News Service, was linked to IPS and some other groups connected with the VVAW's network, and Hersh's My Lai series in turn inspired the Bertrand Russell Foundation and Citizens Commission of Inquiry to launch what became the VVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Narrative/Ensign_War_Crimes.html). I make some allusions to these connections in John Kerry’s Fellow Travellers: Part 3: Hanoi John: Kerry and the Antiwar Movement’s Communist Connections:

What became WSI was originally the project of a group allied with the VVAW, the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into War Crimes in Indochina (CCI). The CCI in turn had initiated its inquiry in November 1969 in response to a call from the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, founded in 1963 by British antiwar leader Bertrand Russell. Russell and his wife Dora had worked with various antiwar groups since World War I, many of which were linked to the Communist movement in Britain and America. During the Cold War Russell came to sympathize with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Vietnam. In 1963 he began opposing the US in the Vietnam War in direct alliance with the North Vietnamese, using his Foundation to attempt to obtain passports for North Vietnamese and broadcasting propaganda over North Vietnamese radio. In 1966 he called for an International War Crimes Tribunal which would apply the principles of the Nuremberg Trials to investigations of alleged war crimes by US troops in Vietnam. The International War Crimes Tribunal began meeting in Sweden and Denmark in 1967 and became independent of Russell’s Foundation.111 It was supported by leading Marxist intellectuals from Europe and America, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, a leading French philosopher who was a periodic member of the French Communist Party and had worked with the Soviet-linked World Peace Council;112 and Noam Chomsky, an American linguist who travelled in 1971 to North Vietnam, where among other things he “negotiated” POW releases as a propaganda ploy to show the “benefits” of cooperating with the North Vietnamese.113 Also participating in the Tribunal were Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and the Black Panthers;114; Carl Oglseby, president of Students for a Democratic Society;115 Peter Weiss, prominent member of the Communist front group the National Lawyers Guild, chairman of the board of the KGB-linked Institute for Policy Studies, and husband of Cora Rubin Weiss (daughter of Communist Party financier Samuel Rubin), who collaborated with the North Vietnamese to extort POW families through the group Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM);116 and Wilfred Burchett, a KGB agent working for the pro-Vietnamese propaganda outlet Dispatch News Service.117 Dispatch News Service provided Seymour Hersh’s story on American war crimes at My Lai to The New York Times in November 1969,118 which stimulated Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal to launch an American branch of its investigation.119 The same month Hersh’s story broke, Russell’s secretary Ralph Schoenman placed an ad to promote the American investigation. He received a response from Tod Ensign of the New Mobe and Black Panthers and his associate Jeremy Rifkin, who had been working with Larry Rottmann of VVAW. Ensign and Rifkin founded the CCI and began forming a coalition with other antiwar leaders and groups, including Chomsky, who had participated in the International War Crimes Tribunal; Richard Fernandez of the Communist-infiltrated group Clergy and Laity Concerned and the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, who travelled to North Vietnam with Chomsky in 1971; Phil Spiro of the Communist Party; participants in an unofficial Congressional war crimes panel which included testimony from psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, a coauthor of Richard Falk, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies, who had previously travelled to North Vietnam with Cora Weiss and was then assisting government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in preparing the Pentagon Papers for publication; and antiwar Senator Charles Goodell.120

Rifkin and Ensign had their office across the street from VVAW headquarters, and in January 1970 they invited the VVAW to join the CCI’s coalition. At first the VVAW could only afford to share their mailing list with the CCI, but in August 1970 the VVAW decided to launch its own supplementary investigation after picking up funding from Jane Fonda.121

SNIP to note on Weiss further down the page:

VVAW lawyer, Peter Weiss

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Well, as far as needing to do things, what evidence is there for attacking Iran, besides making neoconservatives in the Pentagon happy? Is there anything more than assertions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons?

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Money would best be spent on building up Afghanistan and Iraq. I'd prefer it if we just paid the locals to take out the bad guys in Syria or Iran.

I agree. That is a far more palatable option than throwing the war hammer around in the middle east and inflaming Arab opinion against us even more. Are we really safer when we commit ourselves to actions that enhance terrorist recruitment against us?

[piasa]

Iran's been perfectly willing to use terrorism- to a greater degree than any other nation. Does anyone seriously think it's a good idea to let them get nukes while the mullahs run the country?

[windchime]

Thanks for the links, Fedora! The Kerry/Hersh connection was just one I thought I remembered. If you haven't heard it, it was probably poor speculation by a poster or poor memory on my part.

[jpl]

Gee, could it be any more obvious that his sources are guys like Michael Scheuer (I wouldn't be surprised if he were the main source); embittered former intelligence bureaucrats who are opposed to the Bush administration policy?

[Fedora]

I'll keep an eye out for anything to substantiate it. It may be a link developed after the My Lai series, which was published in 1969. Hersh later followed the Winter Soldier hearings. He quotes them in the notes to his 1972 book on My Lai Cover-Up, where he says on page 273:

For information on the allegations regarding prisoner abuses, contact the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), 25 West 26th Street, New York, N.Y., 10010. . .The testimony of its "Winter Soldier" hearings, held in January, 1971, in Detroit, Michigan, received scant newspaper attention at the time. . .A series of similar hearings has been sponsored by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI). . .another veterans' anti-war group which was organized in November, 1969, following the first public disclosures of the My Lai 4 massacre. . ."

[windchime]

Thanks, Fedora!

I'll also keep checking word combinations on Google. Yesterday, your research material kept popping up.

[Fedora]

I just discovered another act of treason Hersh has his hand in:

“Code Names”: DECIPHERING U.S. MILITARY PLANS, PROGRAMS AND OPERATIONS IN THE 9/11 WORLD

“Code Names”: DECIPHERING U.S. MILITARY PLANS, PROGRAMS AND OPERATIONS IN THE 9/11 WORLD, Written by William M. Arkin

The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today. From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.

SNIP

"William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America's constantly expanding hidden world. Code Names is quite simply a stunning array of secrets and super-secrets that Arkin has put together in a way that makes it easy for any citizen to comprehend - and decide for himself or herself whether such activities are consistent with democracy and good government." -- Seymour Hersh

[windchime]

Thanks!

[LibWhacker]

Still waiting, Seymour. Whatta scoop!