The Pentagon yesterday criticized a published article that said it is mounting reconnaissance missions inside Iran to identify potential nuclear and other targets.
"The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organizations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides in the New Yorker article titled 'The Coming Wars,' " the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence T. DiRita, said in a statement.
Hersh's article, published Sunday, was "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed," DiRita said.
Hersh reported that President Bush had signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces military units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
DiRita did not comment on that assertion.
Instead, he said, Hersh's sources fed him "rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist and statements by officials that were never made."
Asked whether U.S. military forces had been conducting reconnaissance missions in Iran, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Defense Department spokesman, said: "We don't discuss missions, capabilities or activities of Special Operations forces."
