Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
VTR
Shoot At Them»
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration
officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a
war with Iran.
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the
overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small
Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was
how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.
During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he
could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office,
an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats,
and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:
HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that
interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats
that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one
of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.
Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing
Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But
that was rejected.
Watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slgBrbNXrbs&e
Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the
Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.
“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000
nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to
run off the highway with us and Iran.”
Transcript:
HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New
Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…
There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me
the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like
Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats
goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.
And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of
— that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe.
My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.
But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very
lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you
get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re
into it.
…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just
about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up.
Get it going.
Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear
warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off
the highway with us and Iran.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/31/cheney-proposal-for-iran-war/