Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner stirred interest last week by stating that “the decision has been made and military operations are under way” in Iran. In an interview yesterday, Gardiner discussed a similar series of covert military operations that occured in Iraq in 2002 — months before either the full-scale invasion in March 2003 or even the passage of the Congressional Iraq resolution in October 2002.

Then, in mid-2002, U.S. and British forces “doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq…in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war.” The bombings received scant attention from the traditional media at the time, but that was by design. According to Gardiner, Rumsfeld had told the military, “you can begin to bomb Iraq, but don’t let it appear on CNN“:

COL. SAM GARDINER: Well, the evidence is beginning to accumulate that a decision has already been made to use military force in Iran. Now, let me do a historical thing, and then I’ll tell you what the current evidence is. We now know that the decision and the actual actions to bomb Iraq occurred in July of 2002, before we ever had a U.N. resolution or before the Congress ever authorized it. It was an operation called Southern Focus, and the only guidance that the military — or the guidance that the military had from Rumsfeld was keep it below the CNN line. His specific words. The evidence that we’ve already –

AMY GOODMAN: Keep it below what?

COL. SAM GARDINER: The CNN line. In other words, I don’t want this to appear on CNN, okay? That was his guidance to the military, you can begin to bomb Iraq, but don’t let it appear on CNN.

Reports by Seymour Hersh and others indicate that U.S. forces are already working in Iran: marking targets, “working with minority groups” and exiles, and “encourag[ing] ethnic tensions.” Will traditional media outlets avert their eyes again?

Read the full interview HERE.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, two weeks ago, lamenting how energy politics ‘warp’ foreign policy:

“I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as secretary of state than the way that the politics of energy is — I will use the word ‘warping’ — diplomacy around the world,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 5.

Condoleezza Rice, last week, sharing a photo-op with Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Nguema is “one of the most brutal, most corrupt and unreconstructed dictators in the world”; he also controls the third-largest oil reserves in Africa:

The Washington Post noted this morning, “The meeting with Mr. Obiang was presumably a reward for his hospitable treatment of U.S. oil firms, though we cannot be sure since the State Department declined our invitation to comment.”

Unfortunately, Rice’s backslapping with a vicious dictator is nothing new:

In 2003, the Bush administration reopened the embassy [in Equatorial Guinea], a move sharply criticized by human rights groups as a favor to the oil companies and to Obiang. Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, decries current U.S. policy, saying that Bush administration officials are “big cheerleaders for the government — and it’s an awful government.”

Read more in this excellent Mother Jones profile.