Hersh Accuses Cheney Of Planning Dirty Tricks Against Iran

By Cernig

Faiz at Think Progress has the exclusive.

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

... During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

If true, this alone would surely be reason enough to impeach Cheney on high crimes and misdemeanours. Whether you believe it or not depends, I suppose, on how much credence you put in Hersh's reporting. He's been saying for a long time that the Cheney/neoconservative faction were trying to start a war with Iran and that war hasn't happened yet. Then again, there's a fair body of other journalism which says that such a non-occurence is mainly due to the contervailing efforts of the likes of Gates, Mullen and Fallon rather than any untruth in Hersh's reporting about Cheney's wishes.

The Cheney camp will, of course, deny it. And if McCain gets elected then by the time anyone gets a chance to look at White House records they'll have been thoroughly cleaned of any whiff of many different wrongdoings.

Comments

[scotth]

When's the last time an unsourced Hersh anything turned out to be the truth?