Cheney's Fingerprints

And Hersh describes what sounds like micromanagement of the covert operations from Cheney's office.

"'Everybody's arguing about the high-value-target list,' the former senior intelligence official said. 'The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney's office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he's getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.'"

The Reaction

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "The article drew a sharp reaction from administration officials, who denied that U.S. forces were engaged in operations inside Iran.

"'I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else,' U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker said yesterday during an interview on CNN's ' Late Edition.'"

But appearing after Crocker on the same show, Hersh suggested that Crocker's denial was both narrow and potentially uninformed: "[W]hen you run secret operations. . . . you may not tell the ambassador everything. Sometimes it's better not to have the ambassador know."

Hersh summed up the dangers presented by Bush's actions this way: "We have the special operations people, and they're great people. They're very loyal soldiers. They do what they're told, going around, killing people around the world without ambassadors knowing it, without the CIA station chiefs knowing it, without Congress knowing.

"If that doesn't sound like -- you know, with this president, if that doesn't make people nervous, I don't know what else would, I can just tell you."

In October, Hersh reported that Cheney was pushing limited strikes against Iran, ostensibly in defense of American troops in Iraq. The White House responded by challenging Hersh's credibility-- while failing to refute any of his allegations.

Borzou Daragahi, blogging for the Los Angeles Times, points out that in an " interview with the Times last week, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said there was 'plentiful' evidence that the U.S. was waging a secret war against Iran, which included funding dissident groups, planting bombs and supporting militants such as the ethnic Baluchi group Jundollah, cited in the Hersh article as a potential recipient of U.S. aid."

Najmeh Bozorgmehr writes in the Financial Times: "The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned at the weekend that Iranian retaliation for a strike on its nuclear facilities could include blocking oil routes and striking Israel with long-range missiles.

"'Any confrontation between Iran and non-regional countries would surely be extended to oil which would definitely lead to a huge increase in prices,' Mohammad-Ali Jafari told the state-owned Jam-e Jam newspaper."

Michael T. Klare writes in a Toronto Star op-ed that "the Bush administration's greatest contribution to rising oil prices is its steady stream of threats to attack Iran, if it does not back down on the nuclear issue. The Iranians have made it plain that they would retaliate by attempting to block the flow of Gulf oil and otherwise cause turmoil in the energy market. Most analysts assume, therefore, that an encounter will produce a global oil shortage and prices well over $200 per barrel. It is not surprising, then, that every threat by Bush/Cheney (or their counterparts in Israel) has triggered a sharp rise in prices. This is where speculators enter the picture. Believing that a U.S.-Iranian clash is at least 50 per cent likely, some investors are buying futures in oil at $140, $150 or more per barrel, thinking they'll make a killing if there's an attack and prices zoom past $200. . . .