Bush preparing for war against Iran?

New York, Jul 1: A report in The New Yorker published Sunday, June 29, suggests that the US is close to armed with Iran than previously believed. The US Congress agreed to the request from the President, George Bush, late last year to fund a large escalation of secret raids against Iran, the foreign affairs reporter Seymour Hersh wrote.

US 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."

However, according to Hersh, "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."

The article "drew a sharp reaction from administration officials, who denied that US forces were engaged in operations inside Iran." Spokesmen for the intelligence committees, the Post notes, "declined to comment," as did the CIA, citing its policy of not commenting "on allegations regarding covert operations.

Seymour Myron Hersh, who has authored this report is an Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, DC. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

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