Seymour Hersh talks to Democracy Now! about his current New Yorker article on the Bush's bombing plans for Iran. Here's a link to an earlier, related New Yorker story from April.

An excerpt from the Democracy Now! interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Your piece is called "Last Stand: The Military’s Problem with the President’s Iran Policy." What's the Pentagon's problem?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, the real problem, above and beyond the Pentagon and throughout the government, throughout our allies, is simply this, that the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and even Israel, have been unable to come up with any specific evidence of what’s known as a parallel or secret weapons program inside Iran. In other words, we know nothing more about the Iranian nuclear program than the Iranians have told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. If there’s a secret underground facility somewhere, we don’t know where it is. And therefore, the only thing to target are the sites that the Iranians themselves have made public in various disclosures under the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to the IAEA, which monitors it. So what’s the target?

JUAN GONZALEZ: In your article, you mention the address by Condoleezza Rice on May 31, where she announced a change in U.S. policy, that it was willing now to sit down and negotiate with Iran, but raised that, from the Iranian perspective, this was not really any kind of change in policy. Could you explain that?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what the article said was simply that there was a precondition that’s been pretty much overlooked in all of the media stuff that’s going on, and the American precondition is very clear, that Iran must stop its nuclear program immediately. It must be verified. And before -- those two steps must take place before we will come to the table.

In other words, we’re asking the Iranian -- the ruling mullahs, whose only real popularity, I think -- the one issue that they have that’s totally popular throughout the country -- it certainly isn’t a human rights policy or the price of bread or milk, which has gone up -- it’s the nuclear program. The idea that the United States could tell the Iranians, this Persian empire, Cyrus the Great, what to do, is very -- it’s anathema to the Iranian people, and this is an issue that runs the gamut of the population. So we’re asking the Iranian clerics who run the country, who aren’t popular, to give up the one issue that’s the most popular one for them, before they sit down at the table.

If you are worried, as many in Iran are, that the United States’ real goal is regime change, to end the rule of the clerics, the Islamic government there, this is a no-brainer. You’re not going to agree to this. So we’re talking about a precondition that’s basically not going to take place. They’re not going to accept it. And that’s why there’s so much trouble going on right now setting a date and beginning the talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, of course, the allegations, weapons of mass destruction, repeated over and over again. You write in your piece “Last Stand” in the New Yorker that we're, in a sense, seeing the same thing again. What is the evidence of Iran having nuclear weapons?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Only what they’ve announced themselves, and we have some reports that are increasingly unreliable from dissident groups. The cult, the MEK, have been saying -- making allegations that we cannot verify. What my friends tell me inside the government is simply this: that there is a consensus that Iran may have an intention to develop an understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle so they can enrich uranium up to the 90% requirement for making a warhead. That may be true. They may have that intention. But what we can see is only what they’ve shown us so far.

There’s no secret program that we know of, and we have been looking very hard. Recently the military, aided by some of our allies -- I would presume the Israelis, but I don’t this for sure -- we have, as I’ve written earlier in the New Yorker, we have our forces inside the country. We have intelligence operatives, etc. And we have been unable simply to find -- you know, where’s the beef?, as, you know, that wonderful line of a few years ago, a decade ago. There is no beef. We cannot find a facility that would indicate Iran has been secretly working to master -- build the bomb, let’s put it that way.

Therefore, even if they do want to do something and have the intention, which we believe they have, that is, the Bush administration does. What are they five, ten, fifteen years away? Who knows how far away they are? What is the rush?