|
. |
US conducting military operations inside Iran: report WASHINGTON (AFP) Jan 16, 2005 Teams of US commandos have entered Iran searching for hidden sites that could be working on developing nuclear weapons, The New Yorker magazine reports in its Monday edition. The government of President George W. Bush has authorized secret military missions inside Iran at least since mid-2004, the magazine reports. Their goal is to identify target information for up to 26 suspected nuclear, chemical and missile sites, according to the magazine. "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq, is just one campaign," a former high-level government intelligence official told the magazine. "The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah -- we've got our years, and we want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism," the official said. A top government consultant with close ties with the Pentagon told the magazine that the Pentagon civilians -- especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and their fellow neo-conservatives -- "want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure and possible." Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that Iran's clerical regime could not withstand a military blow and would collapse, the magazine reports. All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.
|
. |
|