Cheney considered proposal to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians and shoot at them
- added August 07, 2008
- 8 responses
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- goldenways
- added this
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The fact that we’re hearing these kind of stories coming from reputable reporters like Hersh and not just the likes of Alex Jones, should be a wake up call to moderates who find it hard to believe that such clandestine and repugnant operations actually occur.
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.
In Hersh's most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The "meeting took place in the Vice-President's office. 'The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,'" according to one of Hersh's sources.
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.
Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, "if you get the right incident, the American public will support" it.
"Look, is it high school? Yeah," Hersh said. "Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We're playing, you know, who's the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran."
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- goldenways
- 4 months ago
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Transcript:
HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected - which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn't accepted - one of the items was why not…
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.
So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected - uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they're mice training to be rats.
But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we're into it.
…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.
Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We're playing, you know, who's the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.
Kevin Drum adds:
If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
In the end, of course, we didn't do this. We just didn't bother with any pretext at all.
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- goldenways
- 4 months ago
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Sounds insane, and it IS. This dude is the devil.
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These guys played Russian Roulette and lost as far as Iraq goes and now they're loading another bullet into the gun and saying, "Best two out of three!"
But then again Cheney is still convinced that there is such a thing as a "winnable" nuclear war.
But relax. Nancy Pelosi is on the case and....
Never mind. We're fucked.
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This is no surprise...
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Isn't this how Hitler justified the invasion of Poland?
Thinking about it, the U.S. have at least considered it before too...
