Report: CIA "Black Ops" currently underway in Iran

ABC News deserves credit for publishing this story on their blog this morning, even if the release of the information was probably authorized by the White House as a way to further its intended psychological warfare campaign against the Mullahs in Iran. (See this post from Troubled Times from June of last year, this December 2005 article from USA Today and this April 2006 article by Jim Lobe in TomPaine.com for further background on recent US psychological warfare campaigns.)

I guess this story should, in the most purely technical sense, be considered a scoop - even if no one who has been following the current administration's foreign policy in the region should be overly surprised by the revelations given all the recent sabre-rattling. The fact that it is being reported by the mainstream media, regardless of the reason, is however significant.

According to ABC's Brian Ross, intelligence sources indicate that "The CIA has received secret Presidential approval to mount a covert 'black' operation to destabilize the current Iranian government." The fact that this is a "secret" plan is not really so significant, as any sort of authorization the president would give the clandestine spy agency would by necessity have to be undisclosed. That being said, complaints from conservatives that this report is somehow handing state secrets to the Iranians are, I think, ridiculous on their face. I say that because it really strains credulity to think that Iranian intelligence doesn't think that Bush is trying to destabilize their regime.

According to Ross, "Current and former intelligence officers say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option with Iran." This sounds like exactly the kind of disinfo the administration would want the mainstream media to publicize as an off-the-record scoop. And it doesn't make much sense to me as a strategy either. After all, wouldn't such a black ops campaign be more likely to be used as a way to soften up Iranian resistance in advance of a military strike as opposed, say, to being used in lieu of a strike?

And if this ABC piece is indeed part of a wider CIA PsyOps campaign using the supposedly "liberal" media, it is only one small example. As Chris Floyd points out on his blog similiar stories are being fed, it seems, to journalists at the supposedly liberal Guardian across the pond, full of the same scaremongering, weak sourcing and rationales for war as we got from the New York Times back in 2003.

Update: It should go without mentioning that none of this talk about black ops is even remotely new, as this post a few months ago at TomDispatch should make abundantly clear. It's just that until now, the mainstream media hasn't touched these stories with a ten-foot pole, even if journalistic legends like Seymour Hersh were reporting on it for over two and a half years.