by Lucky Gold.
(CNN) - While the world waits to see if Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear program, is it possible that the United States is already at war with Tehran?
David Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times and author of “Confront and Conceal,” said Wednesday on Amanpour that it all began “in a quiet meeting between him (President Obama) and President Bush just days before the inauguration, in 2009, when President Bush said, ‘Look, there are two programs you’re going to want to hold onto. One of them is drones, the other is Olympic Games.’”
“Olympic Games,” said Sanger, “is an effort to get into the Iranian centrifuge system with a computer worm that was a very elaborate effort to get through the defenses the Iranians had built up…send in a worm that would speed up or slow down those centrifuges until they began to blow up.”
Beyond retarding or destroying Iranian’s nuclear program, Sanger suggested there was another objective - “to so wrap the Israelis into the process that they would become convinced that there was a more effective and deniable way to effect the enrichment at Natanz and would make bombing unnecessary.”
It wasn’t anything that anybody said to anyone
Sanger’s revelations have demonstrated a side of President Obama unanticipated when he came into office, offering a stark alternative to the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Some suggest the White House deliberately leaked sensitive information to Sanger for political reasons – to burnish President Obama’s hawkish credentials and boost his re-election chances.
However, in speaking of the major disclosures in his book Sanger insisted “it wasn’t anything that anybody said to anyone. It was the error in 2010 in the summer that allowed the worm that later became known as Stuxnet to escape from the Natanz plant and propagate out across the internet. The United States and the Israelis had not planned on that happening. That was a programming mistake. It made the worm evident to the whole wide world.”
Why should we reveal it to the enemy
Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee takes a very different view. Appearing after Mr. Sanger, he decried the release of the “most secret, highly classified information that would compromise our ability to pursue the goals that our national security requirements dictate.”
As an example, he pointed to “the doctor that helped us in the Bin Laden case. He’s now been sentenced to thirty-three years in prison, probably a death sentence, because he helped Americans. That information was leaked by this administration.”
The purpose of those leaks, said Senator McCain, was clearly political and wants a special counsel to investigate: “The fact is the portrayal of the President in these stories is obviously nothing short of heroic. I don’t think there’s any doubt, according to Mr. Sanger, that dozens of administration officials were involved in this…If they hadn’t talked to him, then he wouldn’t have been able to corroborate it. They obviously talked to him, he states that, that’s wrong.”
Senator McCain was objecting to the politics, not necessarily the policy: “I agree with the cyber warfare,” he said, “but why should we reveal it to the enemy?”