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updated Sat 5 Jul 1:33pm

found on The New Yorker
edited by John (Plastic)
written by mcmath61

Preparing The Battlefield

According to Seymour Hersh's latest expose in The New Yorker, in late 2007 the Bush Administration asked Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees (the so-called Gang of Eight) for $400,000,000 to step up covert operations against the Iranian government, and were given the money they requested. The money was going to be used to fund Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups thought to comprise an opposition to the Iranian regime. Robert Baer, a former clandestine C.I.A. intelligence officer, told Hersh what kind of people we are now funding:

"The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers — in this case, it's Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties."

Ramzi Yousef, convicted in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a leading planner of the 9-11 attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists. Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes the Jundallah, another group the U.S. is now funding:

"This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists. They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture."

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