[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 45 (Thursday, March 15, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H2616-H2618]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page H2616]]
                              {time}  1715
            USING CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Boyda of Kansas). Under a previous 
order of the House, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, you don't negotiate with the barrel of 
a gun, but that seems to be the President's strategy with respect to 
Iran. That is why the House must legislate to ensure that the President 
cannot unilaterally start another war in the Middle East, this time 
with Iran.
  The President has lost all credibility, and the world worries that 
another war will be waged in Iran in the name of regime change. It has 
been over a quarter of a century since the U.S. tried constructive 
engagement instead of destructive isolationism in dealing with Iran.
  Foreign policy under this President has played a role in pushing 
Iran's leaders to the fringe. The Iranian President appears 
intransigent and willing to use strident rhetoric to drive a wedge 
between the United States and other nations. What is our response? 
Showdown and confrontation are the diplomatic skills of this White 
House, a repeat of the spin cycle to foment a march to war against 
Iraq. Today it is economic sanctions against Iran, but what about 
tomorrow?
  Presidential advisers like the Vice President continue to encourage a 
policy of aggression. The President says one thing, but the Vice 
President says all options are on the table. The Secretary of State 
says one thing, but then we read what is going on behind the scenes 
from an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersch. The world is weary over 
the war in Iraq, and the world is worried about the President's 
intentions regarding Iran.
  The other day the Asia Times raised these concerns in the section 
entitled ``Dispatches From America.'' The Times published an article by 
Tom Engelhardt called ``A Bombshell That Nobody Heard,'' and I will 
enter it in the Record. The article considers the troubling information 
revealed by Seymour Hersch, especially the disclosure of U.S. military 
planning for a first strike capability targeting Iran, and ready to go 
on one day's notice.
  Despite official denials, we see and hear the Vice President chill 
the world by saying a military option against Iran has not been ruled 
out. Having seen it before in this administration, one troubling 
thought comes to mind: Bullets and bluster are more likely to produce 
bloodshed than peace.
  That is why the House must exert its constitutional duty when it 
comes to the President's intentions with respect to Iran. We have got 
to chart a new course in the Middle East, and it has to be based on a 
commitment to stop the bloodshed, not guarantee the flow of oil. And we 
cannot hope to achieve peace or stability in Iraq or Iran without 
addressing the Palestinian-Israeli issue openly, honestly and urgently.
  The issues of the Middle East are inextricably interconnected, and no 
one understands that better than Speaker Pelosi. At a time when the 
White House prefers to choose sides, our distinguished leader prefers 
to pursue peace in the Middle East, demanding diplomacy aimed at 
achieving peace through social and economic justice for all.
  It is the kind of vision the whole world has passionately embraced 
before when the world believed the United States could stand taller 
than any problem and person in the region.
  So one has to wonder, what were they thinking the other day when some 
Members of AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, rudely 
booed during a keynote address as the Speaker spoke very plainly on 
this issue. She said the Iraq war has not made America safer, has not 
made Israel safer, and has not made peace in the Middle East much 
easier to achieve.
  That is the truth. What is wrong with speaking the truth? Leaders 
speak the truth because they have a deep and abiding faith in the 
strength of people everywhere to see the truth for what it is and to 
use it to lay a foundation to build a better world.
  Today, America has a Democratic leader willing to see the world as it 
is, but unwilling to leave it that way. These are difficult times and 
we face difficult decisions just ahead. We need a strong commitment to 
get our soldiers out of Iraq and the strength to prevent another 
military misadventure in Iran.
  The path to peace should be littered with pages and pages of 
negotiation, not booby trapped by inflammatory rhetoric and people 
unwilling to listen.
  Madam Speaker, I include for the Record the materials referred to 
earlier

             [From the Asia Times: Dispatches From America]

                     A Bombshell That Nobody Heard

                          (By Tom Engelhardt)

       Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years 
     ago, an ``informal'' meeting of ``veterans'' of the 1980s 
     Iran-Contra scandal--holding positions in the Bush 
     administration--was convened by Deputy National Security 
     Adviser Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the ``lessons 
     learned'' from that labyrinthine, secret and illegal arms-
     for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, 
     the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others--and 
     meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed 
     attempt to outlaw US administration assistance to the anti-
     communist Contras.
       In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets 
     concluded, the complex operation had been a success--and 
     would have worked far better if the Central Intelligence 
     Agency (CIA) and the military had been kept out of the loop 
     and the whole thing had been run out of the vice president's 
     office.
       Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with 
     the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably 
     the Israelis and the British), began running a similar 
     operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public 
     accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Dick 
     Cheney's office. They dipped into ``black pools of money'', 
     possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that 
     have never been accounted for since the US occupation began.
       Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently 
     funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese 
     government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of 
     Sunni jihadist groups (``some sympathetic to al-Qaeda'') 
     whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and 
     to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist 
     Muslim Brotherhood.
       All of this was being done as part of a ``sea change'' in 
     the Bush administration's Middle East policies aimed at 
     rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shi'ite Iran, as well 
     as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian government--and launching 
     secret operations to undermine, roll back or destroy all of 
     the above. Despite the fact that the administration of 
     President George W. Bush is officia1ly at war with Sunni 
     extremism in Iraq (and in the more general ``global war on 
     terror''), despite its support for the largely Shi'ite 
     government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in 
     Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war 
     in that country, some of its top officia1s may be covertly 
     encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shi'ite rift in the region.
       Imagine. All this and much more was revealed, often in 
     remarkable detail, just over a week ago in ``The 
     redirection'', a Seymour Hersh piece in The New Yorker. Other 
     revelations included news of US military border crossings 
     into Iran, new preparations that would allow Bush to order a 
     massive air attack on that land with only 24 hours' notice, 
     and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of 
     four US aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to 
     Bush in the Persian Gulf.
       Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the 
     Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent 
     years, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on, he has 
     consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts 
     of the Bush administration.
       Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, 
     Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthews and CNN's Late 
     Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these 
     claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, 
     seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offenses, if 
     they do indeed reach up to the vice president or president.
       Now imagine the response: front-page headlines; editorials 
     nationwide calling for answers, congressional hearings, or 
     even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into 
     some of the claims; a raft of op-ed-page pieces by the 
     nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding 
     answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold 
     reporters from recently freed media standing up in White 
     House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more 
     information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for 
     hearings and investigations into why the people's 
     representatives were left so totally out of this loop.
       Uh . . .
       All I can say is: if any of this happened, I haven't been 
     able to discover it. As far as I can tell, no one in the 
     mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or the 
     possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is 
     being run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and 
     Saudi money, out of the US vice president's office.
       You can certainly find a few pieces on, or reports about, 
     ``The redirection''--all focused only on the possible buildup 
     to a war with

[[Page H2617]]

     Iran--and the odd wire-service mention of it; but nothing 
     major, nothing earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact, a 
     single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no 
     journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; 
     no congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for 
     investigations or hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not 
     even an expression of fear somewhere that we might be seeing 
     Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment.
       This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable non-response 
     to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress, the 
     media and the nation.
       Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces generally arrive 
     unsourced and filled with anonymous officials (``a former 
     senior intelligence official'', ``a US government consultant 
     with close ties to Israel''). Nonetheless, Hersh has long 
     mined his sources in the intelligence community and the 
     military to striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of 
     sourcing makes it harder for other reporters to follow up, 
     though when it comes to such papers as the Washington Post 
     and the New York Times, you would think that they might have 
     Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims.
       And, of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, 
     congressional representatives and reporters at administration 
     news briefings don't need to do any footwork at all to raise 
     these subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House 
     press briefing last April 10, where a reporter did indeed ask 
     a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker piece.) As 
     far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of 
     Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it is inaccurate 
     or off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug 
     of the U.S. media's rather scrawny shoulders.
       Since the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been so 
     tepid in places where it should count, let me take up just a 
     few of the many issues his report raises.


                          ``Meddling'' in Iran

       For at least a month, the U.S. press and television news 
     have been full to the brim with mile-high headlines and top-
     of-the-news stories recounting (and, more rarely, disputing) 
     Bush administration claims of Iranian ``interference'' or 
     ``meddling'' in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen regularly 
     refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as ``anti-
     Iraq forces'').
       Since Hersh published ``Plan B'' in The New Yorker in June 
     2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were ``running 
     covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria'', 
     he has been on the other side of this story.
       In ``The coming wars'' in January 2005, he first reported 
     that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been 
     ``conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at 
     least since'' the summer of 2004. Last April in ``The Iran 
     plans'', he reported that the administration was eager to put 
     the ``nuclear option'' on the table in any future air assault 
     on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, 
     fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning 
     for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran).
       He also reported that U.S. combat units were ``on the 
     ground'' in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, 
     and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also 
     ``working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, 
     in the north, the Balochis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, 
     in the northeast. `The troops are studying the terrain, and 
     giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and 
     recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,' the 
     consultant said. One goal is to get `eyes on the ground' . . 
     . The broader aim, the consultant said, is to `encourage 
     ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime.''
       In ``The redirection'', he now claims that in search of 
     Iranian rollback and possible regime change, ``American 
     military and special-operations teams have escalated their 
     activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a 
     Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior 
     intelligence official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border 
     in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.''
       In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added: ``We have 
     been deeply involved with Azeris and Balochis and Iranian 
     Kurds in terror activities inside the country . . . and, of 
     course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that 
     through Kurdistan . . . Iran has been having sort of a series 
     of back-door fights, the Iranian government, because . . . 
     they have a significant minority population. Not everybody 
     there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Balochis and 
     Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the 
     country.''
       In addition, he reported that ``a special planning group 
     has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of 
     Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for 
     Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, 
     within 24 hours'' and that its ``new assignment'' was to 
     identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime-
     change targets, but ``targets in Iran that may be involved 
     in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq''.
       Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all 
     of this would still have been significant news--if we didn't 
     happen to live on a one-way imperial planet in which Iranian 
     ``interference'' in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret 
     U.S. operations in, and military plans to devastate, Iran are 
     your basic ho-hum issue.
       America's mainstream news purveyors don't generally 
     consider the issue of the United States' ``interference'' in 
     Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do U.S. pundits 
     consider it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; 
     nor, in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly 
     outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish positions on 
     Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue.
       You can read abroad about rumored U.S. operations out of 
     Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian 
     minorities such as the Balochs and about possible operations 
     to create strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near 
     the Iraqi border--the Iranians seem to blame the British, 
     whose troops are in southern Iraq, for some of this (a charge 
     vociferously denied by the British Embassy in Tehran)--but 
     it's not a topic of great interest in the U.S.
       In recent months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in 
     minority regions of Iran. These explosions have been reported 
     in the U.S., but you would be hard-pressed to find out what 
     the Iranians had to say about them, and the possibility that 
     any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or Anglo-American) 
     covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian fundamentalist 
     regime basically doesn't concern the news mind, even though 
     history says it should.
       After all, many of the United States' present Middle 
     Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the 
     successful CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust 
     prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had nationalized the 
     Iranian oil industry) and install young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi 
     in power as shah.
       After all, in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in 
     Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of the 
     Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm and fund the 
     Islamic extremists who would some day turn on the U.S. for 
     terror campaigns on a major scale.
       As Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars, for 
     instance, ``Under ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services 
     Intelligence] direction, the mujahideen received training and 
     malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb 
     attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill 
     Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA director William] Casey 
     endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career 
     officers.''
       Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq National Accord, an 
     organization run by the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad 
     Allawi, evidently planted, under the agency's direction, car 
     bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie 
     theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam 
     Hussein's regime. The New York Times reported this on its 
     front page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when 
     Allawi was the prime minister of U.S.-occupied Iraq.
       Who knows where the funding, training and equipment for the 
     bombings in Iran are coming from--but, at a moment when 
     charges that the Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced 
     improvised explosive devices, or the means to produce them, 
     are the rage, it seems a germane subject.
       In the U.S., it's a no-brainer that the Iranians have no 
     right whatsoever to put their people, overtly or covertly, 
     into neighboring Iraq, a country that, back in the 1980s, 
     invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, 
     resulting in perhaps a million casualties; but it's just 
     normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled halfway 
     across the planet to dominate the Iraqi military, garrison 
     Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases, build the largest 
     embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send 
     special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well) 
     across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do 
     ``reconnaissance'' or even to foment unrest among its 
     minorities. This is the definition of an imperial world view.


                            Sleepless nights

       Let's leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other 
     matters highlighted in ``The redirection'' that certainly 
     should have raised the odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm 
     button in the U.S. far more than his Iranian news (which did 
     at least get some attention).
       Iran-Contra redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under 
     the leadership of Elliott Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra 
     period pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully withholding 
     information from Congress and was later pardoned), such a 
     meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm that this 
     happened? Does no one want to know who attended?
       Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush administration at one time 
     or another included the late president Ronald Reagan's 
     national security adviser John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John 
     Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as 
     director of national intelligence to avoid the 21st-century 
     version of Iran-Contra--``No way. I'm not going down that 
     road again, with the NSC [National Security Council] running 
     operations off the books, with no [presidential] finding''), 
     Roger Noriega, and Robert Gates.
       Did the vice president or president sit in? Was either of 
     them informed about the ``lessons drawn''? Were the vice 
     president's right-hand men, I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby and/or 
     David Addington, in any way involved? Who knows?
       In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration drew 
     together the seediest collection of freelance arms dealers, 
     intelligence agents, allies and--in the case of ayatollah 
     Ruhollah Khomeini's Iranian regime--

[[Page H2618]]

     sworn enemies in what can only be called ``amateur hour'' at 
     the White House. Now, it looks as if the Bush administration 
     is heading down a similar path and, given its previous 
     ``amateur hour'' reputation in foreign policy, imagine what 
     this is likely to mean.
       Jihadis as proxies: Using jihadis as U.S. proxies in a 
     struggle to roll back Iran--with the help of the Saudis--
     should have rung a few bells somewhere in U.S. memory as 
     another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s--on the 
     theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend--the fundamentalist 
     Catholic CIA director William Casey came to believe that 
     Islamic fundamentalists could prove tight and trustworthy 
     allies in rolling back the Soviet Union.
       In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudi 
     royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni 
     Islam, regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the 
     mujahideen ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the 
     results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring 
     key figures in the Bush administration that this time they 
     have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under control. No 
     problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.
       Congress in the dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of 
     Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan 
     (buddy to the Bushes and Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the 
     people running the black-ops programs out of Cheney's office 
     have managed to run circles around any possibility of 
     congressional oversight, leaving the institution completely 
     ``in the dark'', which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress 
     wanted to be for the past six years. Is this still true? The 
     non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging.
       To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed--and as a major 
     journalistic figure for the past near-40 years he certainly 
     deserves to be taken seriously--the Bush administration seems 
     to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan 
     administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, 
     which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in U.S. 
     history.
       Given what we already know about the Bush administration, 
     Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this 
     means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media 
     and Americans in general, this report should have been not 
     just a wake-up call, but a shout for an allnighter with 
     NoDoz.
       In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly 
     ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a 
     perilous situation--say, clinging to the ledge of a tall 
     building--would be screaming for help, while passers-by were 
     so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, 
     we have the opposite situation: a journalist in essence 
     writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental 
     crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently 
     cares--not yet, anyway--to pay the slightest attention.
       It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a 
     damn.

                          ____________________