Last month on Fox News, Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney, one of the Pentagon's propaganda team of military analysts exposed by David Barstow in the NYT, openly called for the US to begin committing "tit-for-tat" terrorist attacks by proxy inside Iran.

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McInerney: Here's what I would suggest to you. Number one, we take the National Council for Resistance to Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on as well as the Mujahedin-e Khalq at the Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago: For every EFP that goes off and kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked. People don't have to know how it was done. It's a covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. ...

Media Matters' exhaustive research into the NYT story shows that McInerney appeared on Fox News 144 times since Jan 2002, and according to this bio from last year's "Intelligence Summit," McInerney is on the Board of Directors for several companies with defense-related contracts that would seem to benefit from his pro-war propaganda. For example, Alloy Surfaces Company (ASC), whose contracts for "ammunition and explosives" with the Department of Defense appear to have grown from $15 million in 2002 to more than $169 million in 2006. A conflict of interest, perhaps?

The tactic that McInerney advocates of using Iranian opposition terrorist groups to carry out acts of terrorism inside Iran is not new, nor far-fetched. A little digging turned up numerous articles alleging that the pentagon had already been using the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and other groups in cross-border operations into Iran, at least until shortly after Sec Gates took over (Some news reports of attacks in Iran here, here, here, here, here. Iranian news video here).

The MEK (aka MKO, NLA, PMOI, NCRI) is a terrorist group, as designated still by the State Dept, that has killed US troops and civilians before back in the 1970s. Even Bush's first deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, said of the MEK, "I lived there [in Iran] for a year, and it was during that time that our people were killed by the MEK, assassinated. ... So from my point of view they were terrorists." David Ignatius wrote in the WaPo that back in 2003 the US actually rejected a deal with Iran to exchange MEK captives for several top al-Qaeda leaders.

The White House apparently doesn't want you to know about the MEK.

In Dec 2006, just days after Rumsfeld was forced to step down, the NYT published a heavily redacted op-ed by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann. Though none of the info was classified, all of which had previously "been extensively reported in the news media," much of their article was blacked out because the "White House intervened" before it went to print. In response, Leverett and Mann followed up with an accompanying piece "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran" where they provided citations to previously reported sources for all of the redacted info. Raw Story compiled those sources in their "The redacted Iran op-ed revealed" and, surprise, many of the articles refer directly to the MEK terrorist group, but there had been nary a mention in the portions the White House allowed.

So, to recap: One of the Pentagon's propaganda TV analysts who has clear ties to defense industries that would likely stand to benefit from any increased hostilities is advocating that the US ought to use a terrorist organization to commit acts of terrorism against Iran in response to alleged Iranian involvement in attacks against US forces in Iraq, which might be true, or maybe not. And if that wasn't outrageous enough, it seems that Bush may have been authorizing such tactics already.