Notes on Seymour Hersh's book "Reporter"

An American soldier stoking a fire of burning houses during the My Lai massacre on March 16th, 1968 (Ronald S. Haeberle/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty)

by Gaius Publius

Seymour Hersh recently released a book on his life as a reporter, called appropriately, Reporter. It's gotten praise from many quarters, including from novelist and former intelligence officer John Le Carré: "This book is essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over."

Journalist Matt Taibbi has apparently taken le Carré's words to heart, read it (no surprise) and written an interesting commentary on it for Rolling Stone. I'm drawing the observations below from Taibbi's observations.

On Intelligence Agencies "Going Rogue"

Taibbi recounts a story from Reporter about a time when Hersh, who makes his living discovering information that intelligence agencies don't want people to know, was handed a "treasure trove" of secret information the CIA did want him to know.

Taibbi writes:

Late in his new memoir, Reporter, muckraking legend Seymour Hersh recounts an episode from a story he wrote for the New Yorker in 1999, about the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

Bill Clinton was believed to be preparing a pardon for Pollard. This infuriated the rank and file of the intelligence community, who now wanted the press to know just what Pollard had stolen and why letting him free would be, in their eyes, an outrage.

"Soon after I began asking questions," Hersh writes, "I was invited by a senior intelligence official to come have a chat at CIA headquarters. I had done interviews there before, but always at my insistence."

He went to the CIA meeting. There, officials dumped a treasure trove of intelligence on his desk and explained that this material – much of which had to do with how we collected information about the Soviets – had been sold by Pollard to Israel.

On its face, the story was sensational. But Hersh was uncomfortable. "I was very ambivalent about being in the unfamiliar position of carrying water for the American intelligence community," he wrote. "I, who had worked so hard in my career to learn the secrets, had been handed the secrets."

From this Taibbi takes this lesson: "This offhand line explains a lot about what has made Hersh completely embody what it means to be a reporter. The great test is being able to get information powerful people don't want you to have. A journalist who is handed something, even a very sensational something, should feel nervous, sick, ambivalent."

From the same story I take an additional lesson: The CIA, through an active, serving, "senior official," attempted to use an unauthorized intelligence leak of massive proportions to undermine and potentially sabotage the decision of an elected, sitting president, nominally the official's boss via the chain of command, all this in 1999, decades before Donald Trump.

Should Pollard have been pardoned by Clinton? Likely not. Pressure on Clinton from Israel and the Jewish-American community was intense, but he eventually decided against a pardon, and a look at the facts shows he made the right decision. Pollard had done quite a lot of damage, was unrepentant, and acted for gain as well as in the interests of Israel. So justice was done.

Yet the method attempted by the CIA to influence this decision included not just normal chain-of-command influence (going into the president's office and arguing the case), but backdoor leaks to the press (Hersh) calculated to make a pardon politically impossible. In other words, to box in a presidential decision, the agency decided to "go rogue" — use its access to classified intelligence material to force the president it serves to make a decision it preferred.

This is first cousin to blackmail by the keeper of the nation's secrets via a third party (Hersh), and it would actually have been blackmail had someone from the agency gone to Clinton ahead of time and told him of the plan. Which they may well have done.

Keep this intelligence community behavior in mind as you consider (a) how that community operates with respect to U.S. politics; and (b) how it may be helping to get rid of another elected, sitting president, one that few in the Beltway political establishment want to see continue in office.

To be clear: Should Trump be removed as president? I'm a strong yes on that, though you may disagree. How should he be removed? The answer to that sets precedent, doesn't it?

We've had presidents murdered out of office, most recently in 1963, in suspicious circumstances as a matter of fact. To my knowledge we haven't yet had one blackmailed out of office, though that clock has obviously not run out.

On CIA Assassination

Taibbi also brings up the history of political assassination carried out by the CIA: "Hersh was also among the first to describe a burgeoning American assassination program that to this day is poorly understood."

Within weeks of 9/11, for instance, Hersh quoted a "C.I.A. man" claiming the U.S. needed to "defy the American rule of law… We need to do this – knock them down one by one." He later reported on the existence of a "target list" and cited an order comparing the new tactics to El Salvadoran execution squads, reporting that much of this was going on without Congress being told.

That quote, about defying American rule of law, can be found in this New Yorker analysis of Hersh's writing about the executive assassination program in the post 9/11 years, "Close Read: What Did Seymour Hersh Say About Assassination?" published in 2009. It's quite revealing.

For even more about executive assassination, I strongly recommend reading this Hersh account of what really happened to Osama bin Laden — "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" — published in the London Review of Books.

A taste:

'They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,' the retired official [one of Hersh's sources] said. Go straight there. Osama [by now an invalid] was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.' Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. 'Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence?'

The whole thing, including Obama's shameful, self-serving sabotage of the agreed-upon plan, will fascinate you.

How to Be a Reporter

Taibbi ultimately reflects on the journalism business:

The job in many quarters has devolved into feeding captive audiences a steady stream of revelations framed to fit their preconceived ideas about the world, in order to keep them coming back. From Fox to MSNBC, the slant of programming has become more predictable, because audiences hate surprises and dislike being challenged. ...

Hersh's career is a tribute to the pursuit of the "unpredictable result." We used to value reporters who were willing to alienate editors and readers alike, if that's the way the truth cut. Now, as often as not, we just change the channel. This has been bad for both reporters and readers, who are losing the will to seek out and face the unpredictable truth.

I found myself speculating a little as I read those paragraphs. Matt Taibbi is already one of our most valuable journalists. Still, could this signal a change in his own career, or is this just an comment about someone else's career from his own desk at Rolling Stone? Taibbi's admiration is certainly obvious, as is his criticism of his peers.

Either way, Seymour Hersh has committed journalism of the most dangerous kind, putting him several steps ahead of what is now delivered to us as reporting. It would be nice to find a few more like him among the current crop.

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Robert Kennedy Jr.: Syria Is Another Pipeline War

Proposed pipeline routes through the Middle East to gas markets in Europe. The purple line is the Western-supported Qatar-Turkey pipeline. All of the nations it passes through — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey (all highlighted in red) — have agreed to it ... except Syria. The red line is the "Islamic Pipeline" from Iran through Iraq into Syria. See text below for further explanation. (Source: MintPress News; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

Summary first: We have been at war in Syria over pipelines since 1949. This is just the next mad phase.

I'm not sure most Americans have figured out what's happening in Syria, because so much of what we hear is confusing to us, and really, we know so little of the context for it. Is it an insurgency against a brutal ruler? Is it a group of insurgencies struggling for power in a nearly failed state? Is it a proxy war expressing the territorial and ideological interests of the U.S., Russia, Turkey and Iran?

Or something else?

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. it is something else — a war between competing national interests to build, or not build, a pipeline to the Mediterranean so natural gas can be exported to Europe. Inconveniently for Syria, that nation lies along an obvious pipeline route.

Which makes it another war between interests for money — something not very hard to understand at all.

Here's Kennedy's argument via EcoWatch. This is a long piece, well worth a full read, but I'll try to present just the relevant sections here.

The Historical Context: Decades of CIA-Sponsored Coups and Counter-Coups in Syria

Kennedy's introductory section contains an excellent examination of the history of U.S. involvement in Syria starting in the 1950s with the Cold War machinations of the Eisenhower-appointed Dulles brothers, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Together, they effectively ruled U.S. foreign policy.

Kennedy writes (my emphasis):

Syria: Another Pipeline War

... America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

... [W]e need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan [sic] Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency's creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria's democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA's handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za'im. Al-Za'im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.

Kennedy then details the history of coups and counter-coups in and against Syria, and concludes this section with this:

Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.

The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today." ... A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA's bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.

While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.

So much for our supposed interest in "humanitarian" intervention in Syria. From a Syrian point of view, it has never been thus. It has been about pipelines since 1949, and they understand that, even if we don't.

The Current Conflagration

Kennedy then turns to the present, or the near-present. Refer to the map above as you read:

A Pipeline War

In [the Syrians'] view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world's richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar's gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.

The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin's stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia's second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia's conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.

The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.

Which puts the Qatari pipeline squarely opposite to Russia's national interest — natural gas (methane) sales to Europe.

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."

That was likely the last straw vis-à-vis the U.S. Which brings us to another pipeline, the so-called "Islamic Pipeline" (see map above):

"Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline" running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Another, competing pipeline which would run through Syrian territory, but this time carrying Iranian gas instead of Qatari gas. Thus the demonizing of Assad as evil in the mold of Saddam Hussein, instead of just a run-of-the-mill Middle East autocrat, as bad as some but better than others. Kennedy includes a good section on the history of the al-Assad family's rule of Syria, including this information from top reporters Sy Hersh and Robert Parry:

According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn't beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca." Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis."

In September 2013, the Sunni states involved in the Qatar-Turkey pipeline were so determined to remove Syrian opposition to the pipeline that they offered, via John Kerry, to carry the whole cost of an U.S. invasion to topple al-Assad.

Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."

Obama's response:

Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents." But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.

The rest is a history of provocation and over-reaction — a great deal of both — and chaos and death in Syria. Kennedy provides much detail here, at one point adding:

[Syria's] moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad's Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can't blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.

I'll leave it there, but again, do read the entire piece if you want to truly understand what's going on in Syria, and what is about to go on.

Bottom Line

Bottom line, it's as Kennedy said: "No one wants to die for a pipeline" ... but many do and will.

I'll offer three thoughts. One, if we weren't so determined to be deeply dependent on fossil fuels, this would be their war, not ours. Two, we are deeply dependent on fossil fuels because of the political machinations of the oil companies, their CEOs, and the banks and hedge funds who fund them, all of whom pay our government officials — via campaign contributions and the revolving door — to prolong that dependence. We're here because the holders of big oil money want us here.

And three, keep all this in mind during the term of the next president. It will help you make sense of the phony warrior-cum-humanitarian arguments we're almost certain to be subjected to.

We have been at war in Syria over pipelines since 1949. This is just the next mad phase.

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Did You Ever Have Any Doubt That Nixon Was A Traitor To America?

He was-- but "traitor" is a more appropriate description

Writing for Common Dreams, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman assert what many people long suspected. The first paragraph of their piece has only 5 words: "Richard Nixon was a traitor." Right-wing clown George Will was the source of their information, which also points to Kissinger's complicity.

Nixon's newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon's interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams's 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.

Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon's resignation approaches, Will's column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a "plumbers unit" to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation that he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers' later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.

Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks was confirmed by transcripts of FBI wiretaps. On November 2, 1968, LBJ received an FBI report saying Chernnault told the South Vietnamese ambassador that "she had received a message from her boss: saying the Vietnamese should "hold on, we are gonna win."

As Will confirms, Vietnamese did "hold on," the war proceeded and Nixon did win, changing forever the face of American politics-- with the shadow of treason permanently embedded in its DNA.

The treason came in 1968 as the Vietnam War reached a critical turning point. President Lyndon Johnson was desperate for a truce between North and South Vietnam.

LBJ had an ulterior motive: his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, was in a tight presidential race against Richard Nixon. With demonstrators in the streets, Humphrey desperately needed a cease-fire to get him into the White House.

Johnson had it all but wrapped it. With a combination of gentle and iron-fisted persuasion, he forced the leaders of South Vietnam into an all-but-final agreement with the North. A cease-fire was imminent, and Humphrey’s election seemed assured.

But at the last minute, the South Vietnamese pulled out. LBJ suspected Nixon had intervened to stop them from signing a peace treaty.

In the Price of Power (1983), Seymour Hersh revealed Henry Kissinger-- then Johnson’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks-- secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was imminent.

According to Hersh, Nixon “was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government [of South Vietnam] making it clear that a Nixon presidency would have different views on peace negotiations."

Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.”

“I know,” was Dirksen’s feeble reply.

...In the four years between the sabotage and what Kissinger termed “peace at hand” just prior to the 1972 election, more than 20,000 US troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed.

But in 1973, Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.

According to Parry, LBJ wanted to go public with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, talked Johnson out of it. LBJ’s close confidant warned that the revelation would shake the foundations of the nation.

In particular, Clifford told Johnson (in a taped conversation) that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s best interests.”

In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn’t handle the reality that its president was a certifiable traitor, eligible for legal execution.

Fittingly, Clark Clifford’s upper-crust career ended in the disgrace of his entanglement with the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI), which financed the terrorist group Al Qaeda and whose scandalous downfall tainted the Agency he helped found.

Perhaps it was this Nixon maneuver that inspired Ronald Reagan to make almost identically treasonous moves to sabotage the Iran hostage crisis solution President Carter had worked out.

Americans Get A Chance To Vote On War Or Peace In November

Few people would argue against the proposition that the concerted U.S. and Saudi aid to the muhajadeen, meant to destabilize the Soviet Union, has had some extremely grave, unforeseen consequences. The rise of the Taliban may even have been foreseen. 9/11 wasn't. Bush was able to use that, though, as an excuse-- as far fetched as it was-- to attack and occupy Iraq and to tighten the grip of the Military-Industrial complex around the throat of American democracy itself. But what have we-- American citizens and our congressional representatives-- learned from this whole misadventure? Apparently not very much.

A couple weeks ago the New Yorker published an essay by Seymour Hersh about what the Bush Regime-- with congressional approval-- has been up to in Iran. It's like the Afghan tragedy never happened. "Last year," Hersh begins, "Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations." That means they are trying to stir up religious and ethnic hatreds-- the Ahwazi Arabs and Baluchis are Sunnis in overwhelmingly Sh'ia (and paranoid) Iran.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

But they still went along with them-- and not just the reflexive rubber stamps like Boehner, Pat Roberts and McConnell but also Pelosi and Reid. And I have no doubt that Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Silvestre Reyes (R-TX) were overjoyed to sign on to a plot backing violent regime change. As Hersh emphasizes, "In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership-- Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections-- were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."

It appears that some congressional Democratic leaders preferred McCain's "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" approach than Obama's call-- which even Bush apparently has heard-- for diplomacy. "The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. 'The oversight process has not kept pace-- it’s been coöpted' by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. 'The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.'"

Remember this was being done right when McCain was shrilly and hysterically denouncing the National Intelligence Estimate from December which found that Iran hasn't been working on nuclear weapons since 2003. And even today Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen said he's got his hands full just fighting 2 Bush wars without having to worry about a third one. And Mullen (and ex-CentCom head William Fallon) aren't the only ones in the Pentagon trying to head Bush off at the pass. Even his own Secretary of Defense has been warning Democrats to stop Bush's, Cheney's and McCain's insane and relentless drive to force us into a war with Iran.

Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”

Each passing day brings more and better clarity to the differences between McCain's utter Bush-like unsuitability for public office and Obama's excellent and steady, reasoned judgment. But as Howard Fineman pointed out on Chris Matthews' show yesterday, there are reasons-- very powerful ones, why members of the Bush Regime will do all in their power to make sure McCain winds up in the White House.

FINEMAN: If you’re in this White House, you want another Republican administration to follow. You don’t want a Democratic administration coming in there while the evidence is still fresh, so to speak. To look at it the way…

MATTHEWS: With the subpoena power…

FINEMAN: With the subpoena power and looking through all the records and looking at all the decisions that were made. You want to cover over your two terms with a third term the way Ronald Reagan did with George HW Bush.

Meanwhile, the U.S. base of operations against Iran, is making it clearer by the day that-- despite McBush denials-- they want U.S. forces out of their country no later than 2010, something they see eye to eye on with the American public... and the next president.

The White House No-Brain Trust sets its beady eyes on an even excellenter adventure in Iran

The White House No-Brain Trust

"Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program."

-- Seymour Hersh, in "Preparing the Battlefield,"

in the July 7 and 14 New Yorker

"Ooh, that Sy Hersh!"

This, I'm guessing, is what you would hear -- embellished with suitable expletives -- if you could plug into today's communications going in and out of the White House and the Pentagon and wherever the vice president is holed up this weekend.

Credit RawStory with alerting one and all to a new New Yorker piece, already published today on the magazine's website, in which investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (code-named "That Goddamn Busybody" in administration circles) tells us that last year Chimpy the Prez got congressional leaders to pass in silence on plans to spend up to $400 million for "a major escalation of covert operations against Iran," aimed at "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change."

Apparently precious little detail was provided in the "presidential finding" that Chimpy had to provide to the so-called Gang of Eight, the party leaders as well as the ranking members of the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. And some of those leaders are reported to have gone so far as to grumble about the failure to specify what exactly the cowboys of the Bush regime plan to do. According to Hersh's source, “There was a significant amount of high-level discussion,” but not enough to derail the plans.

Interestingly, Hersh's sources report considerably more pushback coming from the Pentagon, from both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirming the view we quoted just yesterday from intelligence and foreign-affairs expert Thomas Powers: "It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon." (Note that the Pentagon figures generally agree with the Bush regime high command about the danger from Iran. What they disagree about is the wisdom of attempting military action.)

Some of what Hersh reports is so familiar that it would be funny if the matter weren't so serious. For starters, it seems that the Cheney-Bush no-brain trust is once again stonewalling, providing the congressional Gang of Eight with the absolute minimum of information they can squeeze the law into requiring -- and of course these are people who believe that the law is what they say it is.

Apparently, the "presidential findings" on covert activities that the administration is legally bound to furnish are being confined to activities exclusively conducted by the CIA. Of course there's also all that cluster of agencies around the Defense Department doing covert operations, and increasingly even CIA operations are done under joint command. As far as the administration is concerned, it appears, none of these activities require presidential reporting, since in their view, of course, the president is the chimp-in-charge of all military matters.

It's hard not to imagine as well that that dribbling psychopath "Big Dick" Cheney, thinking he's oh so smart, is doing the same thing he did with the gathering and analysis of intelligence to make sure he could have his war in Iraq: diverting as much of our covert activity as possible away from that damned CIA to people he can control better, as long as those CIA people keep sassing him about something they keep calling "reality," and refuse to see the world the demented way his diseased brain does.

The other intriguing wrinkle Hersh reports is an extension of the above. From people involved in successful U.S. special ops, he's hearing of significantly increased administration management, even micromanagement, of special ops, about which the No-Brain Trust knows even less than all those things it has shown itself so catastrophically ignorant of. According to Hersh's Pentagon consultant:

We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags -- basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all.

One special point of contention is the No-Brain Trust's demand for immediate results in special ops. This, it seems, is exactly what you can't order up, since successful ops generally require patience, allowing for proper care in the planning and execution.

Wouldn't the world be a safer as well as saner place if the U.S. no-brain trust, headed (for want of a better word) by Big Dick and his sock puppet Chimpy, were spending all their time preparing defenses for their war-crimes trials? At this point, an insanity defense looks like a sure winner.

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SEYMOUR HERSH, GEORGE BUSH AND HULAGU KHAN

In the fall of 1969 I hurried over the forbidding passes and trackless wastes-- well, there were tracks, just no roads-- of Eastern Turkey on my way to Tabriz in northwest Iran. Even if there are roads now, the absolute nonsense in today's Haaretz is as unlikely as anything else emanating from the Bush Regime propaganda machines. "NATO leaders are urging Turkey to open its airspace for an attack on Iran as well and to also open its airports and borders in case of a ground attack." Because even if there are roads, where is Bush going to get the soldiers to attack over them? From Fiji, Latvia, Guatemala and that hot air balloon Cheney has been sitting out the Libby trial with?

This absurd report, apparently meant to frighten someone in Iran-- although I can't imagine who-- claims that Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have given Israel a green light to overfly their territory on the way to bomb Iran. Iranians know what a map of the region looks like better than Bush and there's an awful lot of Jordan and Saudi Arabia between Israel and Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, none of whose governments would survive their own peoples' fury if this silliness was true.

Seymour Hersh sounds a lot more credible to me than Haaretz. His appearance on CNN and his article, The Redirection, in this week's New Yorker indicates that the latest hideous and inhumane goal of Bush Regime foreign policy in the Middle East is to recreate the civil war they sparked in Iraq all over the region, the goal of which is to... well that should be obvious to anyone paying attention. The goal of the Bush Regime is to utterly and violently destroy anything and everything they perceive as a potential threat to American corporate hegemony.

We got our first hint when Rumsfeld presided-- very matter-of-factly, if not overtly jovially-- over the looting of Baghdad, without a doubt a war crime. "Oops, shit happens," is not a valid defense and if there is Justice in the world Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Bush and rest will be tried and dealt with appropriately. As the "reconstruction" billions went straight into the pockets of the Bush Regime's most notorious cronies and political financiers, Iraq's civil society was turned into the worst catastrophe that country has suffered since Hulagu Khan's Mongols sacked Baghdad in the middle of the 13th Century. Like Cheney, Hulagu Khan also considered the innocent civilians "collateral damage." And like Bush's unprovoked attack, Hulagu Khan's caused the deaths of at least a quarter million civilians. In the wake of the Mongols-- and in the wake of the Bush Regime-- mosques, palaces, museums, libraries, and hospitals were looted and destroyed. Hulagu Khan ordered the Caliph and his sons killed, as did Bush with Saddam and his sons and both tyrants turned Shi'a against Sunni to help them destroy the country.

Bush is more than happy to assist his family's tyrannical Sunni business partners preserve their corrupt, tottering monarchies and crush Shi'a aspirations in the process. But for the Neocons in the Bush Regime this is about sending a message... to Korea, China, Russia, Pakistan... anyone who would dare challenge American hegemony: Resist us and we will slaughter your people and devastate your nation.