Secret U.S. commando nuclear-finding missions inside Iran

1/16/2005 10:00:00 PM GMT

According to a Seymour Hersh article in a leading American news magazine, the U.S. has been conducting secret investigative missions inside Iran in order to identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets.

Hersh is the journalist who exposed the flagrant abuses carried out by American soldiers on Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghuraib prison scandal.

The secret missions have been carried out since last summer with the main goal being to identify target information for more than 24 suspected sites.

A government consultant with close connections to the Pentagon has stated, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."

A former high-level intelligence official is also quoted as saying "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The White House has continuously stated that Iran is a major concern and threat that should be taken seriously. But the report on the clandestine missions into Iran have been denied by the Bush administration.

A top aide to President Bush, Dan Bartlett, told a tv news broadcaster "We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran." However, he derided Hersh's recent expose saying "I think it's riddled with inaccuracies, and I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact."

Bartlett maintained that the Bush administration will continue to use and exhaust all diplomatic means in order to convince Iran, one of President Bush's "axis of evil" not to pursue nuclear use, however he did not rule out military might.

"No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military options off the table," Bartlett stated. "But what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now."

According to Seymour Hersh the former intelligence officer has informed him that an American commando task force in South Asia has been working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had had past dealing with their Iranian counterparts. With the information provided for by the Pakistani scientists, this task force has already penetrated into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.

The official adds that in exchange for the assistance provided by the scientists, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has been assured by Washington that his government would not have to hand them over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, in order to face questioning about his alleged role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Hersh further adds in his report that President Bush has already gone and signed " a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

By defining these operations as military and not intelligence one, Hersh states it helps the U.S. administration to get around the legal restrictions imposed on the CIA'd covert activities overseas.