It is part Contra, part “al-Qaeda,” and part Taliban. “A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005,” reports ABC News. “The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran…. U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight.”

Congressionally approved funding is not an issue, as Jundullah’s leader, Abd el Malik Regi, is not only “part Taliban, part Sunni activist,” but a drug smuggler as well—a not uncommon profession for “activists” working for the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. “Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera,” explained Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant.

Not that you’ll hear a peep about this in the corporate media, now so obsessed with the Iranian release of British “hostages,” that is to say admitted military intelligence operatives working for the Royal Marines.

Jundullah members captured in Iran after blowing up a bus with members of the Revolutionary Guard onboard back in February “said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.” Back in 2003, the CIA established “secret bases” in Pakistan, ostensibly to hunt for the dead Osama bin Laden and his dour pranksters, that is to say patsies and mental deficients.

Of course, this is but the latest effort in a long and sordid relationship between the CIA and ISI, stretching back into the 1980s when “the ISI’s Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers,” according to B. Raman, writing for the South Asia Analysis Group. As we know, select members of the “Islamic fundamentalists,” particularly the “Arab volunteers,” later became “al-Qaeda,” the CIA spawned terrorist group named after a Mujahideen database.

“Some former CIA officers say the [Jundullah] arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s,” ABC continues.

In the Contra operation, drug smuggling played a central role, as it did in Afghanistan. “In 1984, stories began to emerge about a secret Nicaraguan Contra network run by a Lieutenant Colonel in the basement of the White House and financed by the importation of large amounts of cocaine,” write Dennis Bernstein and Julie Light. “It was soon revealed that the name of the Lieutenant Colonel was Oliver North and that there was in fact a secret illegal network that was pieced together by the Central Intelligence Agency,” a fact “actively suppressed by Democrats and Republicans alike” during the Iran-Contra hearings. The late Gary Webb, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, documented in “a three-part well-documented story … how the Contra network created, supervised, and funded by the CIA, had run for 10 years a cocaine supply line by transshipping from Central America through San Francisco and down to Los Angeles thousands of kilos of cocaine,” in essence creating the crack cocaine epidemic.

As noted in Volume II of the CIA’s Inspector General’s report, complicity in drug smuggling and the crack cocaine epidemic runs deep—either by direct participation or facilitating a cover-up—including such insiders as Richard Armitage, Frank Carlucci, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Michael Ledeen, Ed Meese, Adm. John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, and James Woolsey.

“For criminal organizations, participating in covert operations offers much more than money. They may get a voice in selecting the new government. They may get a government that owes them for help in coming to power. They may be able to use their connections with the United States government to enhance their political power at home,” explains Jack Blum, the former Chief Counsel to John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism in 1996 Senate Hearings, a subcommittee chaired by Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter. “I think that if people in the government of the United States make a secret decision to sacrifice some portion of the American population in the form of … deliberately exposing them to drugs,” Blum added.

Naturally, sacrificing “some portion of the American population” is no big deal for the U.S. government—although we are told, most recently during the hysterical reaction to the comments of Rosie O’Donnell, that our government would never do such things, never mind ample evidence, from CIA biological weapons experiments conducted upon unwitting citizens to the plans detailed in Operation Northwoods to “sacrifice some portion of the American population” through terrorism and thus hopefully undermine the government of Fidel Castro. As well, history is littered with instances of the U.S. government sacrificing hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers—to say nothing of millions of victims in targeted countries—in “military adventures” stretching back to the Spanish-American War in 1898 and continuing to this day in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if the neocons have their way, Iran.

In effect, the undeclared “secret” war against Iran, well underway as the “story” on Jundullah reveals, is simply the latest episode of this long and sordid history.

It should come as no surprise the effort against Iran is a pet project of Dick Cheney. “ABC cited Pakistani government sources as saying the secret campaign against Iran was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February,” notes a post on the Indian-Muslims website.

Finally, so enamored are the neocons with Cheney, they want to run him as president in 2008, as none of the Republican selectees currently dominating the field are “hawkish” enough, that is to say they apparently lack the required degree of murderous psychosis.

“Mr. Cheney has virtues as a candidate in his own right. He has foreign policy experience by virtue of having served as defense secretary,” an op-ed appearing in the New York Sun assures us. “His wife, Lynne, would be an asset to the ticket in her own right,” as her connections to the military-snoop-industrial complex and the neocon “think tanks” run deep. Dick’s unflagging desire to expand the neocon “war” into Iran, as evidence by his working closely with the dictator Musharraf to spawn yet another CIA created terrorist group, according to the neocon organ the New York Sun, is a “contrast to the carping over tactics that has infected some of the Republican field and to the fever among the Democrats for cutting off funds for our GIs and sounding a retreat.”

Dick Cheney is the neocon choice for president, never mind he may well keel over dead from a heart attack before the “election” come 2008. In that case, the neocons will need settle for one of the other “contenders,” none of them as blood-thirsty and sadistic as Dick.