|
The Administration’s plan for Iran.
By Seymour M. Hersh
09/30/07 "The
New Yorker" -- - October 8, 2007 - - In a series
of public statements in recent months, President Bush and
members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to
an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United
States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training
Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,”
Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in
August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by
Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . The Iranian
regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take
actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to
applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to
confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of
America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran,
then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken
firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House,
pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested
that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a
possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and
government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad
bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and
suspected nuclear facilities and other military and
infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes
on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere,
which, the Administration claims, have been the source of
attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily
as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as
counterterrorism.
The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the
President and his senior advisers have concluded that their
campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an
imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign
before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough
popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second
development is that the White House has come to terms, in
private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence
community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a
bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in
Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging
as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.
During a secure videoconference that took place early this
summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to
Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the
border and that the British “were on board.” At that point,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a
need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic
track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop
interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.
At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a
former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if
limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration
could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive
action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the
Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he
conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in
Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence
official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to
bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile,
the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every
Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from
going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s
ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the
President.”
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has
made it clear that the United States government remains
committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The
State Department is working diligently along with the
international community to address our broad range of concerns.”
(The White House declined to comment.)
I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President
has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for
a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be
issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo
of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told
reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And
two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late
summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of
the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said,
“The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative
size of its operational components.”)
“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently
retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of
analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of
2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi
Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He
added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited
direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will
the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has
not thought it all the way through.”
That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former
national-security adviser, who said that he had heard
discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for
Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an
American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also
in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in
Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”
In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an
“aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who
cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and
arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in
the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he suggested
that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be determined.)
“A lot depends on how stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski
told me. “Will they cool off Ahmadinejad and tone down their
language?” The Bush Administration, by charging that Iran was
interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as ‘We’re
responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski
said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play
the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians
to overplay their hand.”
General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational
forces in Iraq, in his report to Congress in September,
buttressed the Administration’s case against Iran. “None of us,
earlier this year, appreciated the extent of Iranian involvement
in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s leaders all now
have greater concern,” he said. Iran, Petraeus said, was
fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition
forces in Iraq.”
Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the
purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however.
During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath
Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported
them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including
prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,
spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on
Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington
Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to
the point that they are not interfering in our internal
affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any
“proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against
it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is
that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall
of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude
Iran from the Iraqi political scene.
Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts
University, who is an expert on Iran and Shiism, told me,
“Between 2003 and 2006, the Iranians thought they were closest
to the United States on the issue of Iraq.” The Iraqi Shia
religious leadership encouraged Shiites to avoid confrontation
with American soldiers and to participate in elections—believing
that a one-man, one-vote election process could only result in a
Shia-dominated government. Initially, the insurgency was mainly
Sunni, especially Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nasr told me that
Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and
aid to several Shiite factions—including some in Maliki’s
coalition. The problem, Nasr said, is that “once you put the
arms on the ground you cannot control how they’re used later.”
In the Shiite view, the White House “only looks at Iran’s ties
to Iraq in terms of security,” Nasr said. “Last year, over one
million Iranians travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is
more than a billion dollars a year in trading between the two
countries. But the Americans act as if every Iranian inside Iraq
were there to import weapons.”
Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran
poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary,
Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a
revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn
the going international system and to replace it . . . with a
new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth
is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear
arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military
force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that
President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action
that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions
both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz recently told
politico.com that he had met with the President for about
forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against
Iran, and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before
leaving office. (Podhoretz, one of the founders of
neoconservatism, is a strong backer of Rudolph Giuliani’s
Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is a
senior adviser to President Bush on national security.)
In early August, Army Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the
second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Times about an
increase in attacks involving explosively formed penetrators, a
type of lethal bomb that discharges a semi-molten copper slug
that can rip through the armor of Humvees. The Times reported
that U.S. intelligence and technical analyses indicated that
Shiite militias had obtained the bombs from Iran. Odierno said
that Iranians had been “surging support” over the past three or
four months.
Questions remain, however, about the provenance of weapons in
Iraq, especially given the rampant black market in arms. David
Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and the chief weapons inspector in
Iraq for the United Nations, told me that his inspection team
was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq wars, by “the huge
amounts of arms” it found circulating among civilians and
military personnel throughout the country. He recalled seeing
stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges
that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs.
Arms had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their
Shiite allies in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the
Baath Party.
“I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside
Iraq today,” Kay said. “When the White House started its
anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I thought it was all
craziness. Now it does look like there is some selective
smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to
American pressure and American threats—more a ‘shot across the
bow’ sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going
to get away with its threats so freely. Iran is not giving the
Iraqis the good stuff—the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot
down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”
Another element of the Administration’s case against Iran is the
presence of Iranian agents in Iraq. General Petraeus, testifying
before Congress, said that a commando faction of the
Revolutionary Guards was seeking to turn its allies inside Iraq
into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests.” In August,
Army Major General Rick Lynch, the commander of the 3rd Infantry
Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops were
tracking some fifty Iranian men sent by the Revolutionary Guards
who were training Shiite insurgents south of Baghdad. “We know
they’re here and we target them as well,” he said.
Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, told me that “there are a lot of Iranians
at any time inside Iraq, including those doing intelligence work
and those doing humanitarian missions. It would be prudent for
the Administration to produce more evidence of direct military
training—or produce fighters captured in Iraq who had been
trained in Iran.” He added, “It will be important for the Iraqi
government to be able to state that they were unaware of this
activity”; otherwise, given the intense relationship between the
Iraqi Shiite leadership and Tehran, the Iranians could say that
“they had been asked by the Iraqi government to train these
people.” (In late August, American troops raided a Baghdad hotel
and arrested a group of Iranians. They were a delegation from
Iran’s energy ministry, and had been invited to Iraq by the
Maliki government; they were later released.)
“If you want to attack, you have to prepare the groundwork, and
you have to be prepared to show the evidence,” Clawson said.
Adding to the complexity, he said, is a question that seems
almost counterintuitive: “What is the attitude of Iraq going to
be if we hit Iran? Such an attack could put a strain on the
Iraqi government.”
A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American
intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been
making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We
know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense
capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react
asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.”
There is also specific intelligence suggesting that Iran will be
aided in these attacks by Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is capable, and
they can do it,” the diplomat said.
In interviews with current and former officials, there were
repeated complaints about the paucity of reliable information. A
former high-level C.I.A. official said that the intelligence
about who is doing what inside Iran “is so thin that nobody even
wants his name on it. This is the problem.”
The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos
in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British
forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area. Over
the course of this year, however, the region became increasingly
ungovernable, and by fall the British had retreated to fixed
bases. A European official who has access to current
intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the
American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting
many of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the
deaths of British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are
getting in from Iran. They have been able to penetrate many
groups”—primarily the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias.
A June, 2007, report by the International Crisis Group found,
however, that Basra’s renewed instability was mainly the result
of “the systematic abuse of official institutions, political
assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and
enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal
mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and
officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside
interference”—from bordering Iran—“to justify their behavior or
evade responsibility for their failures.”
Earlier this year, before the surge in U.S. troops, the American
command in Baghdad changed what had been a confrontational
policy in western Iraq, the Sunni heartland (and the base of the
Baathist regime), and began working with the Sunni tribes,
including some tied to the insurgency. Tribal leaders are now
getting combat support as well as money, intelligence, and arms,
ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Empowering Sunni
forces may undermine efforts toward national reconciliation,
however. Already, tens of thousands of Shiites have fled Anbar
Province, many to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, while Sunnis
have been forced from their homes in Shiite communities. Vali
Nasr, of Tufts, called the internal displacement of communities
in Iraq a form of “ethnic cleansing.”
“The American policy of supporting the Sunnis in western Iraq is
making the Shia leadership very nervous,” Nasr said. “The White
House makes it seem as if the Shia were afraid only of Al
Qaeda—but they are afraid of the Sunni tribesmen we are arming.
The Shia attitude is ‘So what if you’re getting rid of Al
Qaeda?’ The problem of Sunni resistance is still there. The
Americans believe they can distinguish between good and bad
insurgents, but the Shia don’t share that distinction. For the
Shia, they are all one adversary.”
Nasr went on, “The United States is trying to fight on all
sides—Sunni and Shia—and be friends with all sides.” In the
Shiite view, “It’s clear that the United States cannot bring
security to Iraq, because it is not doing everything necessary
to bring stability. If they did, they would talk to anybody to
achieve it—even Iran and Syria,” Nasr said. (Such engagement was
a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.) “America cannot
bring stability in Iraq by fighting Iran in Iraq.”
The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its
tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among
generals and admirals in the Pentagon. The strategy calls for
the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely
targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to
destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps,
supply depots, and command and control facilities.
“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical
strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told
me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had
been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in
Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in
place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything
they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have
been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in
the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft
surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a
path out,” the former official said.
A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the
bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series
of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special
Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said,
“Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”
A limited bombing attack of this sort “only makes sense if the
intelligence is good,” the consultant said. If the targets are
not clearly defined, the bombing “will start as limited, but
then there will be an ‘escalation special.’ Planners will say
that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The
goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls
go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike
planning.”
The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America’s
allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel’s military
and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant
said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran’s nuclear
facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli
government, the former senior official told me, that the more
limited target list would still serve the goal of
counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the
Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control
over the nuclear-research program. “Our theory is that if we do
the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things,” the
former senior official said.
An Israeli official said, “Our main focus has been the Iranian
nuclear facilities, not because other things aren’t important.
We’ve worked on missile technology and terrorism, but we see the
Iranian nuclear issue as one that cuts across everything.” Iran,
he added, does not need to develop an actual warhead to be a
threat. “Our problems begin when they learn and master the
nuclear fuel cycle and when they have the nuclear materials,” he
said. There was, for example, the possibility of a “dirty bomb,”
or of Iran’s passing materials to terrorist groups. “There is
still time for diplomacy to have an impact, but not a lot,” the
Israeli official said. “We believe the technological timetable
is moving faster than the diplomatic timetable. And if diplomacy
doesn’t work, as they say, all options are on the table.”
The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the
newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon
Brown. A senior European official told me, “The British
perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they
want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing. All the
intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical
assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of
terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through
Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”
There were four possible responses to this Iranian activity, the
European official said: to do nothing (“There would be no
retaliation to the Iranians for their attacks; this would be
sending the wrong signal”); to publicize the Iranian actions
(“There is one great difficulty with this option—the widespread
lack of faith in American intelligence assessments”); to attack
the Iranians operating inside Iraq (“We’ve been taking action
since last December, and it does have an effect”); or, finally,
to attack inside Iran.
The European official continued, “A major air strike against
Iran could well lead to a rallying around the flag there, but a
very careful targeting of terrorist training camps might not.”
His view, he said, was that “once the Iranians get a bloody nose
they rethink things.” For example, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Ali
Larijani, two of Iran’s most influential political figures,
“might go to the Supreme Leader and say, ‘The hard-line policies
have got us into this mess. We must change our approach for the
sake of the regime.’ ”
A retired American four-star general with close ties to the
British military told me that there was another reason for
Britain’s interest—shame over the failure of the Royal Navy to
protect the sailors and Royal Marines who were seized by Iran on
March 23rd, in the Persian Gulf. “The professional guys are
saying that British honor is at stake, and if there’s another
event like that in the water off Iran the British will hit
back,” he said.
The revised bombing plan “could work—if it’s in response to an
Iranian attack,” the retired four-star general said. “The
British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable
people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a
cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead
American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added,
“a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was
sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the
war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s
office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown
will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The
burden of proof is high.”
The French government shares the Administration’s sense of
urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran
will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s
newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late
August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not
halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to
the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the
former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French
government have concluded that the Bush Administration has
exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they
believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American
problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the
Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing
will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda
toward Iran.”
A European intelligence official made a similar point. “If you
attack Iran,” he told me, “and do not label it as being against
Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will strengthen the regime, and
help to make the Islamic air in the Middle East thicker.”
Ahmadinejad, in his speech at the United Nations, said that Iran
considered the dispute over its nuclear program “closed.” Iran
would deal with it only through the International Atomic Energy
Agency, he said, and had decided to “disregard unlawful and
political impositions of the arrogant powers.” He added, in a
press conference after the speech, “the decisions of the United
States and France are not important.”
The director general of the I.A.E.A., Mohamed ElBaradei, has for
years been in an often bitter public dispute with the Bush
Administration; the agency’s most recent report found that Iran
was far less proficient in enriching uranium than expected. A
diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is based, said, “The
Iranians are years away from making a bomb, as ElBaradei has
said all along. Running three thousand centrifuges does not make
a bomb.” The diplomat added, referring to hawks in the Bush
Administration, “They don’t like ElBaradei, because they are in
a state of denial. And now their negotiating policy has failed,
and Iran is still enriching uranium and still making progress.”
The diplomat expressed the bitterness that has marked the
I.A.E.A.’s dealings with the Bush Administration since the
buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “The White House’s claims
were all a pack of lies, and Mohamed is dismissive of those
lies,” the diplomat said.
Hans Blix, a former head of the I.A.E.A., questioned the Bush
Administration’s commitment to diplomacy. “There are important
cards that Washington could play; instead, they have three
aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian Gulf,” he said.
Speaking of Iran’s role in Iraq, Blix added, “My impression is
that the United States has been trying to push up the
accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack—as an
excuse for jumping on them.”
The Iranian leadership is feeling the pressure. In the press
conference after his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked about a
possible attack. “They want to hurt us,” he said, “but, with the
will of God, they won’t be able to do it.” According to a former
State Department adviser on Iran, the Iranians complained, in
diplomatic meetings in Baghdad with Ambassador Crocker, about a
refusal by the Bush Administration to take advantage of their
knowledge of the Iraqi political scene. The former adviser said,
“They’ve been trying to convey to the United States that ‘We can
help you in Iraq. Nobody knows Iraq better than us.’ ” Instead,
the Iranians are preparing for an American attack.
The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that
the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders
that they can stand up to an American attack. “The Guards are
claiming that they can infiltrate American security,” the
adviser said. “They are bragging that they have spray-painted an
American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close
to them.” (I was told by the former senior intelligence official
that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an
American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while
docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.)
“Do you think those crazies in Tehran are going to say, ‘Uncle
Sam is here! We’d better stand down’? ” the former senior
intelligence official said. “The reality is an attack will make
things ten times warmer.”
Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension
over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that
what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired
at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its
mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few
truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7
missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way
of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come
from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through
black-market arms dealers.
Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked
closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story:
“The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us
about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason
to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he
said.
The retired four-star general confirmed that British
intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along.
“The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said,
“but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.” ♦
by Seymour M. Hersh
Click
on "comments" below to
read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We
encourage engaging, diverse and
meaningful commentary. Do not
include personal information such
as names, addresses, phone
numbers and emails. Comments
falling outside our guidelines
– those including personal
attacks and profanity – are
not permitted.
See our complete
Comment
Policy and
use
this link to notify us if you
have concerns about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and
remove any inappropriate
postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
