All right, y'all, Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, introducing investigative journalist Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker magazine.
He's the author of the book Chain of Command and has been working on the story of America's upcoming war with Iran for a few years now.
A couple of important articles of note, The Coming Wars and Next Act.
The new one is called Preparing the Battlespace.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Hello.
It's very good to have you here.
Now, the first thing I wanted to focus on in this article is what Secretary Gates told some Democrats, a senator apparently passed on a conversation to you, that if George Bush starts a full scale war, a preemptive war from the air, at least, I guess, against Iran, that he expects severe consequences for the American people for even generations to come.
Yes, he went to a lunch with, actually, the Democratic caucus, and it was on background.
And usually those things don't get leaked.
But what he said was, literally, as the senator remembered it, and there were about 20 senators there.
This was quite a bit of conversation.
He just happened to be asked about bombing Iran, and he said, if we do, we'll be fighting, our grandchildren will be fighting jihadists.
And that woke up everybody.
And there was a lot of back and forth about it, and he said it was his personal opinion.
And this was late last winter.
And I should tell you that his office, the New Yorker, of course, sent a summary of what we were going to write to his office.
And his office replied that he remembered the lunch, but he didn't recall that particular aspect, or he had a difference of opinion.
But the bottom line, I don't know what else he could say, perhaps, but the bottom line is that he's not alone.
There are many military men who think it was just like many people in society at large think it would be silly and foolish and reckless to get into a kinetic war with Iran without talking to them.
I should also add, there's also a lot of people in the military that say, bring it on, you know.
It goes both ways.
Yeah.
Now, the article is called Preparing the Battlespace, and the relevance there is that this is sort of a loophole, it sounds like, in the law, where the president can put much of his covert activity under the auspices of the military so that they won't have to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about it.
Yep, that's about basically right.
It's not really a loophole because it's not an inadvertent thing.
It's something that was done deliberately.
But the president under the law, and this is after the scandals of the CIA scandals and the scandals of covert operation that took place.
That is CIA.
When people go on undercover and they get arrested, they can't say they're CIA.
They have to be tried as spies, although most of them do acknowledge it eventually.
But still, theoretically, all covert operations have to be briefed to the Senate and House Intelligence Committee, and also various senior members of Congress have to be notified at the House Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader, etc., etc., both sides, both Democrat and Republican.
The leadership has to know.
The loophole, if you will, is simply that this president, after 9-11, determined that anything the military did, whether covert or clandestine, anything they did was not covert.
It was always, it just wasn't covert, even if it was most secret operations with Americans operating without a uniform.
It's not covert, and it wasn't covered by the statute, and everything that's going on the military does is part of preparing the battlefield, which is the president's prerogative under the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief.
So Congress has never briefed on those operations.
So the situation that I write about, it's a complicated story, and on one hand, it seems like a simple story, you know, just the fact that there was a secret finding, and the president had, under the law, he has to tell Congress in a finding, that's the technical word they use for the document informing them of the covert operation.
Congress funds, last winter, it's hard to believe, but the Democratic Congress authorized or at least funded 400, put $400 million aside in, oh, who knows where the money comes from, the budget.
It's hidden.
There's a lot of money floating around in our government anyway, in our budget, particularly for special ops and clandestine operations.
And so, you know, Congress votes a lot of money in, and when, you know, the dust settles, they're not sure what they voted for, because the son of a gun.
They voted $400 million in covert stuff, and then they discover there's a lot of military stuff going on, apparently using, being financed by the money they sent, and about which they're told nothing.
Uh-huh.
Well, it sounds like what they're doing with at least some of this money is backing al-Qaeda-tied groups like Jandala in Pakistan.
Yeah, they're, well, but Jandala's in Iran, it's the Jandala group in Iran, it's a Sunni group who are backing, we're backing Kurds, some Sunni Kurds, we're backing some Sunni Baluchis, and don't forget Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the famous alleged mastermind of 9-11, and Ramzi Youssef, who blew up the, who was prosecuted for blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, were both Baluchi Sunnis.
We're funding them.
We're funding some Arab groups, the Awazi Arabs, who are a minority inside Iran, the Shia, but they're a minority in terms of being Arabs, as opposed to not Persian.
And so all of this is with an eye towards getting something seriously, perhaps some serious insurgency going on, and meanwhile we have our special forces, the JSOC, our special operation guys going around and looking for high-value targets, in this case it's probably, so I wrote nuclear scientists and other things like that.
It's all designed for escalation, and it's, and to create a causeless belly, to create an incident that the Iranians would have to respond to, that the Americans then can use as a vehicle for going in.
I see.
And I'd like to ask you one more real quick question.
You wrote before about how the option of using nuclear weapons in a first strike against Iran was on the table before, and then you wrote that it had been taken off, and there have been a few reports back and forth about that.
Per your current understanding, does the use of nuclear weapons, is that still involved in the plan for air war against Iran?
No, absolutely categorically not, as far as I know.
Okay, great.
Thank you very much for your time today.
No problem, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's Seymour Hersh from The New Yorker magazine.
The new article is called Preparing the Battlespace.
It's our top headline today at antiwar.com.
