Seymour Hersh on Iran

Seymour Hersh tends to be right. Let's hope he's not this time. Click here for the video.

Hersh: There has been some violence. So America, my country, without telling Congress, using funds not appropriated, I don't know where, by my sources believe much of the money obviously came from Iraq where there is all kinds of piles of loose money, pools of cash that could be used for covert operations.

All of this should be investigated by Congress, by the way, and I trust it will be. In my talking to membership — members there, they are very upset that they know nothing about this. And they have great many suspicions.

We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…

He — that is one of the reasons, I was told. Negroponte also was not in tune with Cheney. There was a lot of complaints about him because he was seen as much of a stickler, too ethical for some of the operations the Pentagon wants to run. (full transcript below the fold)

Interestingly, he discusses a possible explanation for Negroponte's resignation of his office as National Intelligence Director in favor of an undersecretary position at State. Given Negroponte's experience with Iran contra, the parallelism of flavors may have spooked him out.

He also talks about how we seem to be taking sides in the Sunnis vs Shiites struggle, and the consequences that flow from that decision.