19 May 2008

Pentagon Propagandist General Calls for US to Sponsor Terrorism Against Iran

Last month on Fox News, Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney, one of the Pentagon’s propaganda team of military analysts exposed by David Barstow in the NYT, openly called for the US to begin committing “tit-for-tat” terrorist attacks by proxy inside Iran.

McInerney: Here’s what I would suggest to you. Number one, we take the National Council for Resistance to Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on as well as the Mujahedin-e Khalq at the Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago: For every EFP that goes off and kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked. People don’t have to know how it was done. It’s a covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. …

Media Matters’ exhaustive research into the NYT story shows that McInerney appeared on Fox News 144 times since Jan 2002, and according to this bio from last year’s “Intelligence Summit,” McInerney is on the Board of Directors for several companies with defense-related contracts that would seem to benefit from his pro-war propaganda. For example, Alloy Surfaces Company (ASC), whose contracts for “ammunition and explosives” with the Department of Defense appear to have grown from $15 million in 2002 to more than $169 million in 2006. A conflict of interest, perhaps?

The tactic that McInerney advocates of using Iranian opposition terrorist groups to carry out acts of terrorism inside Iran is not new, nor far-fetched. A little digging turned up numerous articles alleging that the pentagon had already been using the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and other groups in cross-border operations into Iran, at least until shortly after Sec Gates took over (Some news reports of attacks in Iran here, here, here, here, here. Iranian news video here).

Crooks and Liars » Pentagon Propagandist General Calls for US to Sponsor Terrorism Against Iran