Seymour Hersh sees Bush's sticky fingerprints

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Monday August 14, 2006 19:34

by R. Isible

The New Yorker: Watching Lebanon Aug 14 2006 by Seymour M. Hersh

Sy Hersh (widely speculated to have lots of good CIA informants) writes in the New Yorker that the Bush administration needed the Israelis to invade Lebanon so that Hezbollah's long-range missiles could be removed (so that when the USA attacks Iran there won't be any possibility for retaliatory strikes
Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
[...]
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

The article contains a lot more detail and speculation about possible splits within the Whitehouse Bush/Cheney vs Rumsfeld vs Rice and the misdirection of information to directly bypass the NSA and end up in directly in the new intelligence structures created by Cheney.

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Comments (3 of 3)

Seymour Hersh article

by Fred Johnston

Mon Aug 14, 2006 20:27

Sirs - Good too to hear Robert Fisk talk on RTE radio today about just this article, to which he gave considerable credence. I don't know why we're surprised that the US planned, or co-planned, if you like, the Israel re-invasion of Lebanon, well in advance. It is what they do. As Robert Fisk predicted in The Independent (London) not so long ago, Israel will grab anxiously at peace and call it a victory over Hezbollah; what their attempted destruction of Hezbullah HAS managed to do is show that the erstwhile-considered mighty Israeli military is not indestructible and thus reduced realistic notions of their own security considerably. This will surely worry George W. Bush, who can now be virtually certain that morale has been boosted amongst hardliners in Iran. I haven't a doubt that the ill-fared re-invasion of Lebanon was plotted at the Pentagon; as things stand, Israeli internal dissatisfaction with the operation could even prompt changes of Knesset leadership.

Nevermind

by ?

Mon Aug 14, 2006 23:53

Found it - News at One. It's only 5 minutes long

Listen at: http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/228-2164996.smil (Realplayer)

Hersh appeared on Democracy Now today

Listen at: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/1358255

Rat trap

by Noel

Tue Aug 15, 2006 13:30

So the mighty IDF has been defeated by the rag tag band of freedom fighters known as Hezbollah?
Perhaps this comprehensive humiliation of the obviously over-rated Israeli military will embolden both Syria and Iran to attack. Those pesky Zionists wouldn't be expecting that either.
They're not used to kicking their neighbours arses when attacked.

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Seymour Hersh sees Bush's sticky fingerprints

Comments (3 of 3)