listen/watch/read transcript - link:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1438251snip:"SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, well, actually, it’s funny. The plans have both intensified and they're less intense, in this sense: the new plan that they're talking about is much more limited, not a thousand points of light. It doesn’t involve massive Air Force bombing attacks. Most of the Iranian nuclear facilities that were the initial target are -- many of them are underground, one in particular, Natanz, where the centrifuges are located, where Iran is enriching uranium, seventy-five very hard feet underground. And the bombing plans were extreedingly -- you had to put one bomb after another with no guarantee of knocking down the facility"
snip:"SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, look, there’s nothing but bad blood between ElBaradei, the Egyptian who runs the -- who's the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- basically the position there in Vienna, as I see it or as I’m told by the people I know there, is this, that Iran has not been very successful in enriching uranium. In the last report they filed -- I think August the 30th -- they made the point -- the IAEA reported that Iran had only been able to enrich uranium, after all these years, to 3.67% enrichment, even below the 4% or 5% you need to run a peaceful atomic reactor, a non-military reactor, well below the 90% you need. That doesn’t mean Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons ambitions. It doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually get to 90% if it keeps on working on it. But it does mean that there’s no near threat at all.
And it just so happens that in the White House they have finally come to terms in the Vice President's office, and I assume in the President's office -- I don’t know much about what goes on with Bush -- but in the Vice President's office, they’ve come to terms with the more or less general consensus with the American intelligence community and most of the European Community that Iran is a minimum of five years away. Iran has been five years away from the bomb, oh, for fifteen or twenty years. I wrote a story about Iran in late 2001 that said then five years away. It’s always been five years away.
There’s no evidence that Iran is significantly into weapons fabrication or that Iran has done any of the kind of testing it needs to do to develop an actual warhead. And so, they are enriching, and they may have ambitions, but there’s no rush. And ElBaradei has been saying that. And he’s getting -- I wrote some pretty harsh things in the magazine about his view. He believes that the United States has essentially been lying and misrepresenting the data. And he feels that they’ve really been doing -- playing fast and loose with some very important information -- you know, that is, where the Iranians are for their own short-term political goals, the goals sort of that are articulated by Bolton."
snip:"This war in Iraq with the Muslims that we're into and this sort of hostility we have to the Shia world and to Hamas and to Syria, this is strategic. We are putting ourselves into a situation where, for the next twenty, thirty years, we could be in a serious free-for-all, particularly if we go into Iran. It would be -- the war would spread. There’s no question, the Iranians will respond asymmetrically. By that, I mean they won’t necessarily hit Israel or hit targets in America; they might just do things in the Gulf; they certainly would do things inside Iraq and inside Afghanistan. If they start doing things inside Afghanistan, they have to protect their borders. We control the countries on both sides of Iran: Afghanistan and Iraq. If they start doing things in Afghanistan to protect their position, Pakistan may come in. You’re looking at unbelievably strategic issues here. And Vietnam never crossed the tactical barrier. It was stupid, stupid, stupid, and killer, killer, killer, but nothing as potentially devastating to the lives of all of us as what this President is doing now and, if he expands the war, what he will do."
listen/watch/read transcript - link:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1438251.
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