Sy Hersh

Kinda late in coming but here is the Sy Hersh article on the "re-direction" towards the Sunnis in the Bush administration.

Here is Hersh on OpenSource.
A piece critical of Hersh from Reason Magazine by Michael Young here.

Two main pieces of information in the article:

1.The US is funding black operations in Iran. Hersh claims that John Negroponte resigned from Director of National Intelligence and moved back to the State Dept. because he was so worried about the black ops which came out of Cheney's. The US is arming Iranian Kurds, Azeris, and other non-Persian minorities in Iran.

--i.e. If and when our war begins with Iran begins it will be a replay of the Afghanistan war. The US will provide the aerial bombardment and the other groups will provide the ground troops like the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc.) against the Taliban Pashtun. Cheney believes the Iranians will have the bomb soon--in opposition to intelligence agencies. Cheney also believes that Hezbollah has infiltrated the US and therefore Iran with a bomb will sneak it into the US. Hence the 1% Cheney Doctrine takes over, i.e. we must bomb them. It's scary what he thinks.

--The difficulty with this program is that the Iranian Army is not the Taliban. It's 450,000 strong.

2. More dangerously because the US is supporting full boar the Sunni (and Druze) government of Foud Sinora in Lebanon, money has changed hands and the Lebanese and Saudis are funding Salafi jihadists. i.e. the al-Qaeda groups in Palestinian refugee camps. The US is funding and training, if Hersh is correct, whether it realizes or not, the same groups that attacked the US on 9/11. Really think about that for a second. Also to work against the government of Assad in Syria, Walid Jumblatt (head of Druze in Lebanon) has promoted support/training for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is the parent body of Hamas, who we will not recognize in Palestine. The thought is that Assad will deal with the Israelis (this could happen), but the question is whether pushing on him in this way will pull him back into the Iranian orbit.

--How can we be considering funding these Salafi wackos, not recognize them in Palestine, and then claim that the Shia are the real enemies, when Iran helped us in the Taliban war.

--Prince Bandhar, the former Saudi Ambassador to the US is behind all of this and has convinced Cheney and Bush, so says Hersh, that this time around the Salafis can be trusted. Saudi Arabia also pulled the Mecca Conference of unity between Hamas and Fatah against US and Israeli wishes. Are the Saudis yet again playing the US? This is a point at which conservatives should really look into and question this policy.