US lacks 'explosive' evidence against Iran

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA18Ak02.html

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - For 18 months, the administration of US President George W Bush has periodically raised the charge that Iran is supplying anti-coalition forces in Iraq with arms.

Previously, high administration officials have always admitted that they had no real evidence to support these claims. Now, they are going further. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters on her current Middle Eastern trip, "I think there is plenty of evidence that there is Iranian involvement with these networks that are making high-explosive IEDs and that are endangering our troops, and that's going to be dealt with."
However, Rice failed to provide any evidence of official Iranian involvement.

The previous pattern had been that US and British officials suggested that Iranian government involvement in the use by Sunni insurgents or Shi'ite militias of "shaped charges" that can penetrate US armored vehicles was the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the facts. But when asked point blank, they admitted that they had no evidence.

That allegation serves not just one Bush administration objective, but two: it provides an additional justification for aggressive rhetoric and pressure against Tehran and also suggests that Iran bears much of the blame for the sectarian violence in Baghdad and high levels of US casualties from IEDs.

The US command admitted at first that the Sunnis were making the shaped charges themselves. On June 21, 2005, General John R Vines, then the senior US commander in Iraq, told reporters that the insurgents had probably drawn on bomb-making expertise from the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's army.

But some time in the next six weeks, the Bush administration made a decision to start blaming its new problem in Iraq on Tehran. On August 4, 2005, Pentagon and intelligence officials leaked the story to the National Broadcasting Co (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System that US troops had "intercepted" dozens of shaped charges said to have been "smuggled into northeastern Iraq only last week".

Last November, as the release of the Iraq Study Group Report approached, Bush administration officials again planted the story of intercepted Iranian-made weapons and munitions it had leaked in mid-2005. The American Broadcasting Co reported on November 30 that a "senior defense official" had told the network of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories".

At about the same time, Bush apparently gave orders that the US military should seize any Iranians in the country in an effort to get some kind of evidence to use in support of its propaganda theme. The first such operation came in central Baghdad just before Christmas, and a second raid against Iranian diplomats in Irbil was carried out to coincide with the president's speech on a new Iraq policy on January 10.

These raids, presented to the public as part of a campaign against targets supposedly identified through good intelligence, were clearly aimed at trying to substantiate an anti-Iran line for which the Bush administration has no credible evidence. Those raids now create a requirement to produce something new to justify them.

[leveymg]

1. The Iranian IED charge was repeated again today in a

US News and World Report article by Anna Mulrine. That also reveals the existence of Task Force 16, a previously secret DoD-CIA force that's aggressively going after Iranians inside Iraq.

Mulrine, 33, a previously little-known USNWR editor, has been given a highly-detailed dossier, which she used to lay out the White House case against Iran:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070118/18military.htm

U.S. Launches Armed Force to Block Iranian Influence in Iraq

By Anna Mulrine

Posted 1/18/07


The U.S. military has launched a special operations task force to break up Iranian influence in Iraq, according to U.S. News sources. The special operations mission, known as Task Force 16, was created late last year to target Iranians trafficking arms and training Shiite militia forces. The operation is modeled on Task Force 15, a clandestine cadre of Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force soldiers, and CIA operatives with a mission to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives and Baathist insurgents in Iraq.

Task Force 15 killed al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, last June.The new classified directive is part of an escalation of military countermeasures against Iran, authorized by President Bush, to strike back at what military officials describe as a widespread web of Iranian influence in Iraq that includes providing weapons, training, and money to Shiite militias. "It's present, and the issue is how do you deal with it," says a senior U.S. military official. "That's the question of the day. Those networks are something you've got to deal with. You've got to figure out, bottom line, who plans them, who finances them, who brings stuff across the borders."

Bush signaled the new get-tough stance toward Iran in his recent televised address on Iraq policy.
"We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," Bush said in his speech to the nation last week. "We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

SNIP

ran's efforts to foment chaos in Iraq are primarily carried out by the Iranian intelligence service and the Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds (Jerusalem) Brigade, the foreign operations arm of the Iranian military, which also supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. The most visible Iranian political and militia involvement has been in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq, especially in and around the oil export city of Basra. Iran is also seen as a major backer of anti-American Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, blamed for abducting and killing Iraqi Sunnis.

SNIP

U.S. military officials have been tracing the growth of Iranian influence through the increased use of Iranian-made explosively formed projectiles (or EFPs) as roadside bombs. When this particularly deadly and distinct variation on the improvised explosive device detonates, it melts and reshapes metal, turning it into what is essentially a deadly dart that punches through a humvee's armor plates. "When the EFPs start popping up, we know, oh, that's Iran, that's Shia," says one U.S. special operations officer who served in Iraq. A senior American commander in Baghdad adds that the military has been able to trace numbers and manufacture dates back to Iran. And the use of weapons like EFPs, say soldiers on the ground in Iraq, is spreading. "They were initially used just down south, where Iran has a lot of influence," says the officer. Now they are moving into Baghdad and areas north of the city as well. "That is a change. If you follow the track of them, it also follows the track of Iranian influence."

[leveymg]

2. More on Gen. Vines statement re: IEDs

The use of larger, deadlier roadside bombs started in the Sunni areas north and west of Baghdad. Shaped charges are a fairly sophisticated, but not beyond the technical abilities of Saddam's former military, that employed similar techniques in the old regime's rocket program. This from the NYT report cited by Porter:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:vpgZwaKfFygJ:www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/12058

Iraqi Rebels Refine Bomb Skills, Pushing Toll of GI's Higher
By David S. Cloud
The New York Times

Wednesday 22 June 2005

SNIP

General Vines, who spoke by telephone from Iraq, said that the insurgents' tactics "have become more sophisticated in some cases," and that they were probably drawing on bomb-making experts from outside Iraq and from the old Iraqi Army.

SNIP

In addition to technical improvements in their bombs, insurgents, especially in rural areas, are resorting to packing more explosives into the devices to disable armored vehicles, Army experts at the Fort Irwin conference said. Hundreds of armored Humvees have been rushed to Iraq over the past year, and Pentagon officials say unarmored vehicles are now confined to bases. Still, five marines were killed this week near Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, when their vehicle hit an I.E.D. Earlier this month, five marines were killed after their vehicle struck a bomb in Haqlaniya, about 150 miles northwest of Baghdad.

A senior Marine officer with access to classified reports from the field said that the vehicles involved in the two fatal attacks were armored Humvees but that the bombs "were so big that there was little left of the Humvees that were hit." Insurgents have long been able to build bombs powerful enough to penetrate some armored vehicles. But the use of "shaped" charges could raise the threat considerably, military officials said. Since last month, at least three such bombs have been found, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing this month. The shaped charge explosion fires a projectile "at a very rapid rate, sufficient to penetrate certain levels of armor," General Conway said, adding that weapons employing shaped charges had caused American casualties in the last two months. He did not give details.

A Pentagon official involved in combating the devices said shaped charges seen so far appeared crude but required considerable expertise, suggesting insurgents were able to draw on well-trained bomb-makers, possibly even rocket scientists from the former government. Shaped charges and rocket engines are similar, the official said. Infrared detonators are an advance over the more common method of rigging bombs to explode after an insurgent nearby presses a button on a cell phone, a garage-door opener or other device that gives off an electric signal. That approach is vulnerable to jammers, however, and a shift to infrared detonators, which rely on light waves, underscores the insurgents' resourcefulness.

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[leveymg]

3. This is essentially the same charge levelled in summer 2005.

The complicity of the Iranian government in this was never proven, so the story went away. Note the usual reliance on "unnamed officials". Note, however, that MSNBC cites for this allegation a very familiar name: Michael Ledeen at AEI, who is also suspected of involvement in cooking up the counterfeit Niger Yellowcakes documents. Here's how the story was framed in August 2005:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8829929/

Shipment of high explosives intercepted in Iraq
Most sophisticated of roadside bombs reportedly coming from Iran

By Jim Miklaszewski
Chief Pentagon correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 6:54 p.m. ET Aug 4, 2005

U.S. military and intelligence officials tell NBC News that American soldiers intercepted a large shipment of high explosives, smuggled into northeastern Iraq from Iran only last week. The officials say the shipment contained dozens of "shaped charges" manufactured recently. Shaped charges are especially lethal because they’re designed to concentrate and direct a more powerful blast into a small area. “They’ll go right through a very heavily armored vehicle like an M1-A1 tank from one side right out the other side,” says retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey.

Military officials say there’s only one use for shaped charges — to kill American forces — and insurgents started using them in Iraq with deadly effectiveness three months ago. Intelligence officials believe the high-explosives were shipped into Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary guard or the terrorist group Hezbollah, but are convinced it could not have happened without the full consent of the Iranian government. And Thursday, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld accused Iran of attempting to derail the democratic process in Iraq. Iran’s Shiite government has also struck up a seemingly strange alliance with Sunni insurgents to try to drive the American military out of Iraq.

"They are desperate to get us out of Iraq” says Michael Ledeen, author of "The War Against the Terror Masters" and resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. “If we succeed in Iraq they will be surrounded by elected governments.” Military officials acknowledge that these explosives are only the tip of the iceberg... and predict the deadly bombings in Iraq are far from over.

[leveymg]

4. The use of shaped charges not new in Middle East insurgencies

Defense Update, an Israeli website, admits that shaped charge IEDs aren't anything new in the region. This source states that Israeli ordinance experts merely "assumed" that Iran is the source of the more sophisticated devices:

http://www.defense-update.com/features/du-2-05/IED-2.htm


Shaped Charges IED in the Middle East


Shaped charge IEDs are not new in the Middle East insurgency wars. The IDF Bomb Disposal crews have uncovered, what they designate as Kela type IEDs, in Lebanon and in Gaza. Activated through catapulted triggering devices, the weapon uses an improvised chemical shaped charge type, between 10-50kg and can be launched from stand-off or electrical fuze from several meters distance. The initial types have been relatively ineffective against armored vehicles, but the heavier versions have caused catastrophic results in softer or lightly armored vehicles.

Other types of IED used by Hamas and Hezbollah are super-heavy "belly" explosive devices, also frequently packing some special types of shaped charge explosives to penetrate AFV hulls from the vulnerable bottom. Penetration by chemical jet stream into the fighting compartment activated catastrophic secondary explosions in unprotected internal tank ammunition stores. Israeli experts assumed that the know-how about the preparation and use of such devices was imported from Iranian demolition experts.

[marmar]

5. Not to worry, they'll just make some more shit up.

:think: