I SHIT YOU NOT! The U$ is Funding Violent Al Qaeda-Linked Groups to Contain Iran

OK, I'm a fairly obsessive Iraq-watcher, even I was gob-smacked by this one and think it should be front page news:

The US is Funding Violent Al Qaeda-Linked Groups to Contain Iran

"In Lebanon, the Administration has co-perated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda...."We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

Now if the news had come from some nutty conspiracy theorist, you could ignore it, but it comes from Seymour Hersh - one of the most respected and decorated investigative journalists in the world today.

War on Terror? Nope - just a War of Terror.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh
-