Grave news: The Pentagon has ordered a major “strike group” of ships to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran’s western coast.
The fleet includes the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship.
This is serious.
According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received recent orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.
“This is very serious,” said Ray McGovern, a former CIA threat-assessment analyst who got early word of the Navy officers’ complaints about the sudden deployment orders. (McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA, resigned in 2002 in protest over what he said were Bush Administration pressures to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq. He and other intelligence agency critics have formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.) McGovern, who had first told a group of anti-Iraq War activists Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, DC, during an ongoing action called “Camp Democracy,” about his being alerted to the strike group deployment, warned, “We have about seven weeks to try and stop this next war from happening.”
David Swanson, coordinator for Camp Democracy, has written a piece in response to this news: Nuclear Winter, Global Warming, or Impeachment.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 