Bush and Cheney are just as popular as they always were, scoring a full 23% approval rating in the latest LA Times poll, which is easily as much approval as they deserve. Heck, one could likely those 23% would stay with them if they decided to mount an offensive in Iran. And that’s just what Seymour Hirsh claims they are going to do. But not before Bush and Cheney listen to their own Intelligence Agency’s opinions on the Iran Nuke program, and then summarily reject the report. Here’s the LA Times poll, and here’s the story about the US Intel.

Why did they reject US Intelligence estimates about how the Iranians don’t have an active nuclear program? …

According to Seymour Hirsh Bush and Cheney want to reprise their attack on Iraq with an attack on Iran, and they’ve ramped up the clandestine assets as a preclude to that action. I’m not buying everything Hirsh says here, as I think Even Bush and Cheney won’t squander their legacy when their 23%ers are the only ones in the world who would support such action, but here’s a bit of the report from Seymour Hirsh’s appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s “Late Edition.” from The Swamp at the Baltimore Sun:

CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,” guest-hosted by Candy Crowley, featured an article in The New Yorker magazine by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh charging that U.S. military commandos have been operating inside Iran since at least 2005, with a substantial increase in such activities within the past year.

The commandos, attached to the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., are the least-known of this country’s special warfare operatives. According to Hersh, their activities are financed with a secret $400 million “black” budget approved by congressional subcommittees that are not fully aware of the activities being undertaken.

According to Hersh, those activities include capturing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and taking them into Iraq for interrogation.

Although Congress must be briefed on the clandestine intelliegence-gathering operations of the CIA, Hersh maintained that the “cross border” forays into Iran were not intelligence related but strictly military operations authorized by the Pentagon under the rubric of “preparing the battlefield” in Iran for an eventual war, and therefore not reportable to Congress.

The current article is one of a number in which Hersh has maintained that the Bush administration is preparing for some kind of attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a charge he repeated Sunday by declaring that the Bush White House is determined not to leave office with Iran’s nuclear capability intact–although various experts have suggested it will take that country 10 years to develop a workable nuclear weapon.

What The Swamp missed was Candace Crowley’s interview with Mitch McConnell, a man running for his political life in Kentucky because of his close association with Bush and Cheney. She asked him about Hirsh’s article, and he was his ever astute self, on top of the issue and ready to serve America with his opinion. Here it is from the CNN transcript:

CROWLEY: I want to read you something. This has to do with Iran and Iraq. Sy Hersh has written a new article in the New Yorker with some pretty explosive things in it, mostly about special operations going on, deep into Iran.

So I want to read you something from this article, where he says, “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others.”

Do you know anything about secret ops going into Iran, you all approving hundreds of millions of dollars for that?

MCCONNELL: Well, I haven’t seen Sy Hersh’s article, and really wouldn’t have any comment on that.

CROWLEY: Well, you would recall, though, if you had in fact agreed to special ops operations into Iran, wouldn’t you?

MCCONNELL: I really wouldn’t have any comment on that, Sandy — Candy, excuse me.

Sy Hirsh doesn’t really scare me all the time. I’ve seen him report remarkably accurate and scary things, like the Abu Ghraib situation, for instance, but I’ve also seen him report some stuff that hasn’t much backing. Let’s just say it boggles my mind that Bush and Cheney are headed towards war when they’ve got so little of the world and even their own country behind them. Then again, one shouldn’t underestimate the power of the incompetence emanating from the Bush Cheney Administration. What scares me here is Mitch McConnell’s “no comment.” Mitch is a man who usually would defend just about anything the Bush Administration puts forth. Yeah, that reticence could be a result of McConnell in a tight Senate race, trailing by some measures. I’m just not sure there is precedent for McConnell keeping his yap shut, and that seems to me a sure sign that there’s something the Bushies are doing in Iran that they aren’t telling us? Does that go as far as what Hirsh alleges? That remains to be seen.