Wednesday, April 04, 2007

OUR GUYS

Echoing Seymour Hersh, ABC's Brian Ross and Christopher Isham identify an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that's being funded by the U.S. to undermine Iran, with no congressional oversight:

A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.

The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran....

Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states....

"He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.

"Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera," Debat said....


That jibes with what Hersh told us a couple of months ago:

The U.S. has ... taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

The Bushies tell ABC that Jundullah is helping in the fight against Al Qaeda. But a Pakistan news source asserted in 2004 that Jundullah is linked to Al Qaeda:

"Many of those involved in the recent terrorist attacks in the city received training in camps in Waziristan," says Tariq Jamil, chief of the Karachi police. "Jundullah has close ties with Al-Qaeda."

And the Asia Times noted in 2004 that

Jundullah was allegedly headed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander of the September 11 terrorist attack in the US.

Whose brilliant idea is this? Hersh told us:

While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney.

And ABC now says:

Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February.

The Democrats should have started impeachment proceedings against this sonofabitch in the first hundred hours.

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