(Hat-tip NealeNews) The following is taken from a Guardian Unlimited article.
...Hersh told CNN yesterday: "I think they really think there's a chance to do something in Iran, perhaps by summer, to get the intelligence on the sites.
"The last thing this government wants to do is to bomb or strafe, or missile attack, the wrong targets again. We don't want another WMD flap. We want to be sure we have the right information."
The New Yorker report said the Americans have been conducting secret reconnaissance missions over and inside Iran since last summer with a view to identifying up to 40 possible targets for strikes should the dispute over Iran turn violent.
"This is a war against terrorism and Iraq is just one campaign," Hersh quotes one former US intelligence official as saying. "The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we're going to have the Iranian campaign."
Another unnamed source described as a consultant close to the Pentagon said: "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
Update: It seems that David Frum is pretty ticked at the Bush Administration over this. Not that they are working in (spying on) Iran but that the major leaks are happening and they are not being punished. He claims that there is a mutiny going on over at the CIA.
...Read Seymour Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker with a yellow marker in hand. Can you count how many vital national security secrets – secrets that could potentially get US personnel killed – have been betrayed in just this one article by serving and former agents of the Central Intelligence Agency or by serving or senior and former military officers?
...Leaking is a favorite Washington blood sport. Up until this year, the Bush administration suffered comparatively little from it. The Bush White House is legendarily discreet. Even more impressively, the career public servants at the departments and agencies have been heroically disciplined. Many of them must surely disagree with this or that Bush administration policy – and yet they have kept their battles within the walls. As compared to the Reagan years especially, the domestic side of the government has learned to settle its disputes in a responsible and loyal way.
But over in the departments and agencies where lives are on the line, nothing is sacred. It was bad enough during campaign year 2004, when anti-Bush officials pushed news stories that distorted reality in order to help Kerry defeat Bush. Yet those stories only concerned the past. Unfair as they might be, they did not put lives at risk. Now though anti-Bush officials are blabbing about secret and deadly missions, even revealing the routes the agents are taking.
...The fact is that considerable elements of the national security apparatus have gone into open mutiny against this war. If the only way to stop it is to drive the country to defeat, then they will welcome – and indeed hasten – that defeat. If the administration is to save the situation, it must begin by taking sabotage of the war effort at least half as seriously as it takes indiscretion at the Department of Health and Human Services. The saboteurs do not believe that the administration will take serious action against them. It’s long past time to correct that misapprehension.
