- Have You Heard of the CIA's Iran Mission Center ?... Archived Message
Posted by alquds43
on June 19, 2019, 4:45 pm
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Published on Tuesday, June 18, 2019 by Common Dreams Have You Heard of the CIA’s Iran Mission Center? These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking a war against Iran by Vijay Prashad .....Extract... Iran Mission Center In 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a special unit—the Iran Mission Center—to focus attention on the U.S. plans against Iran. The initiative for this unit came from CIA director John Brennan, who left his post as the Trump administration came into office. Brennan believed that the CIA needed to focus attention on what the United States sees as problem areas—North Korea and Iran, for instance. This predated the Trump administration. Brennan’s successor—Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director for just over a year (until he was appointed U.S. Secretary of State)—continued this policy. The CIA’s Iran-related activity had been conducted in the Iran Operations Division (Persia House). This was a section with Iran specialists who built up knowledge about political and economic developments inside Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. It bothered the hawks in Washington—as one official told me—that Persia House was filled with Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran. Some of them, due to their long concentration on Iran, had developed sensitivity to the country. Trump’s people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group that would provide the kind of intelligence that tickled the fancy of his National Security Adviser John Bolton. To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D’Andrea. D’Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program, and he ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach. It was D’Andrea who expanded the CIA’s drone strike program, in particular the signature strike. The signature strike is a particularly controversial instrument. The CIA was given the allowance to kill anyone who fit a certain profile—a man of a certain age, for instance, with a phone that had been used to call someone on a list. The dark arts of the CIA are precisely those of D’Andrea. What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D’Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D’Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed attitude toward Iran, D’Andrea is known—ironically—as “Ayatollah Mike.” ...... Read more https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/18/have-you-heard-cias-iran-mission-center |
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