Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports a major scoop in the current edition of the New Yorker. AFP has an overview:

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

…The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.

…In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

Hersh’s account is consistent with other recent reports. This week, the former deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Wayne White, told Forward Magazine:

In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned that the administration has been giving thought to a heavy dose of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sector without giving enough weight to the possible ramifications of such action.

Joseph Cirincione, a respected non-proliferation expert who decribed himself as “the last remaining person in Washington who believed President George W. Bush when he said that he was committed to a diplomatic solution,” wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine last week that senior administration officials had already made up their mind about to attack Iran:

[C]olleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran…What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

Read the whole story by Hersh.

from thinkprogress