US military already in Iran?

Some of us thought that the huge difficulties of the Iraq occupation would at least have unintended side benefit: reigning in the out-of-control neo-conservatives. Perhaps such hope was naive.

The BBC is reporting that US commandos are operating inside Iran selecting sites for future air strikes, says the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

Hersh is the journalist who did the most extensive reporting on the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Hersh says that American special forces have conducted reconnaissance missions inside Iran for six months... The New Yorker journalist adds that President Bush has authorised the operations, defining them as military to avoid legal restrictions on CIA covert intelligence activities overseas.

Additionally, He reports as well that American special forces units have been authorised to conduct covert operations in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The White House denounced the report as inaccurate.


Update: War Department spokesman Lawrence Deritta issued a statement that read, "Mr. Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed... Mr. Hersh's source(s) feed him with rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist, and statements by officials that were never made." This according to The Boston Channel and other sources (unfortunately I couldn't find a transcript; Fox News, which usually provides transcripts for comments related to their articles, hasn't run a story on this as of mid-Monday afternoon).

Additionally, the statement called Iran's apparent nuclear ambitions and its "demonstrated support for terrorist organizations" a global challenge that "deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides in The New Yorker article titled 'The Coming Wars.'"

A very telling statement. To me, the comments say: "We declare that Hersh's article contains particular falsehoods but we won't say explicitly 'American troops aren't in Iran.'"

Notice the vigorous demonization of Iraq, neatly mixed in with a denial of Hersh's specifics (without an explicit denial of his broader assertion). I suggest that was done to lay the groundwork for something.