The Telegraph (UK) is reporting that 81 mm mortar shells of Iranian manufacture were captured by Iraqi police January 13, 2007. A photograph of one of the the shells is shown with the markings “81 MM” and “3-2006” on it. Here’s the photograph:
What’s wrong about this picture? Several things. The absence of dating using the Iranian calendar for one thing. The use of the Roman alphabet for the markings on the shell, rather than the use of Farsi, for another. You see, in the past, Iranian armaments that have been captured or found had markings on them which were printed in Farsi (which uses a form of the Arabic alphabet) such as these from 1997:
…However, a significant portion of newer ordnance originated in Iran, as indicated by Farsi markings stenciled onto it. This included large quantities of G-3 assault rifles, landmines, and mortar ammunition. […]
No. 4 Pedal Mines (Iran—green plastic with Farsi writing, shoe mines) […]
[M]ost of the equipment the SAF captured from Eritrean Islamic Jihad in the Togan area of northeastern Sudan in April 1997 bore Farsi writing and was Iranian-made, from boots to light weapons.
Isn’t that odd? Iranian armaments, including mortar shells, have markings in the Farsi language on them when discovered in the Sudan in 1997, but Iranian arms alleged to have killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq have no Farsi markings on them when captured in 2007. Even odder, most US troop deaths (by far) have occurred in the Sunni areas of Iraq (e.g., Anbar province, around Tikrit, West Baghdad), but these Iranian arms are supposedly being delivered to Shi’a militias. What could possibly explain this seemingly counterintuitive inconsistency? It couldn’t possibly be a disinformation campaign by the Pentagon (like the one employed by the US Military in the run-up to the Iraq invasion) targeted at generating support for a military strike against Iran among the American public, could it?
The strategy is clear. Define a target as evil. Find some kind of connection with weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, nuclear—or just to low-tech “terrorism,” draw some sort of Hitler parallel and get strategically placed press people on board. Plant the stories, then cite them as though they were troubling news to you. Then cite “intelligence”—this mystical reservoir of wisdom restricted to the elite (rather like the gnosis of ancient mystery religions)—trusting that the foolish masses will accept it on faith, at least until the job’s all done and the noble lies are inevitably exposed. You can always scapegoat the intelligence community for any errors. It can’t, by its very nature, resist that scapegoating.
Like Fox News, I only report. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.
Shout outs to boilerman10 and idredit for the information that sparked this story.
The thing I found most remarkable about this story is that the evidence — such as it is — was presented by anonymous US military officials. What next, a cloaked and masked US State Department official making a presentation on this to the UN?
Utter crap. Scoffed at by another Brit newspaper. Patrick Cockburn’s
TARGET:TEHRAN – The Independent, UK
US has no moral authority.
Yes, those Iraqis sure got dumb fast, didn’t they?
They just don’t even care enough to make a believable case for what they’re about to do next.
No they don’t. It’s shameless.
BTW, this "Iranian arms killed 170 Americans" is a front page story for my local paper this morning, above the fold.
I guess that explains why they couldn’t use Farsi writing on them, then. The remaining sheeple in the US might not be able to read Farsi…
Interesting this:
Breaking News: Americans caught with Iranian Weapons in Iraq
This gonna be a hard sell, worldwide. The lies on Iraqi WMDs return to bite. But that won’t deter Cheney from launching the air strikes on Tehran. There’s all those oil and gas fields that we just cannot allow China to sow up. Cheney will cry all the way to Halliburton’s bank account. That’s the only tears he’ll shed.
I bet there are a few folks in the administration who wish they had known the difference between a Sunni and a Shia a few years earlier than they did…
The question is, how many regular people understand that we have been ‘allied’ with Iran for some time now by virtue of backing the Shia in Iraq?
with this administration, facts get in the way. Unimportant.
the Iranian Consulate, abduction of diplomats and the B/E job on the Iraqi Health ministry, I don’t think the worlds gonna bite this time.
We’ve given up all pretense to diplomacy and civility. These are maniacs.
We need a truth commission like post apartheid South Africa established.
Do democratic leaders have the guts to stand up to these fabrications and demand accountability?
It was also the first story on the CBS news this morning. I didn’t watch The Today Show but I would bet money they led with it too.
This could be a smoking gun that prevents a war, but only if it is read beyond this site. How does this information get disseminated?
Email the story to Olbermann and others, maybe.
Several years ago, there was a report (I can’t remember which network) which had a package discussing the improvised explosive devices and how they were now more sophisticated and FROM SYRIA. These were the new “shaped charges” that were in use in the theater.
The problem was, these SYRIAN devices had ALL ENGLISH labels. No other language was printed on the device.
I tried to find that image again, but no luck.
This mortar story is not the first like it.
My husband is a pretty avid military historian, and he’s laughing and crying at the same time! Now, of course, there’s no reason to believe this isn’t black market munitions (it very likely is) and that Iranian factions like Hezbollah aren’t smuggling them in. But that’s not the Iranian government, as a whole–or at least, correlation does not imply causation.
The best way to insure that Iran (along with Russia and China) are impossible to deal with for a decade or more is to push this issue beyond talking and simply lob a few bombs at them.
A very high level, vocal and well publicized meeting of rational voices on all sides needs to occur now. If that’s not the government, then it may have to be others. I fantasize that voices like Shinin Ebadi, along with real American moderates like Feingold, perhaps Richardson, Carter…might meet in Jordan or Qatar and actually talk together.
Back when Reagan aided the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan (yes, those Islamist extremists) we gave them guns, bombs and other armaments and set up training camps to make sure they used them effectively. But we didn’t give them American weapons, no siree, Bob! The CIA scoured the various black markets for Chinese and other weapons so that we would have deniability – even though what we were doing was no secret to the Soviets (for further deniability we did all this through the near-autonomous Pakistani intelligence service). Two points: if the weapons were Iranian it doesn’t mean they were sourced from the Iranian government as anyone could buy them pretty much anywhere, and if the Iranian government really did want to supply arms to Iraquis they sure as hell wouldn’t give them Iranian arms as they can buy from black markets the same way as we did.
Steve coll’s Ghost Wars is a fascinating history of our involvement in Russia’s blunder in Afghanistan. Iraq could well bring down the US the same way Afghanistan did the Soviet Union.
Except for one thing. In the past, when they wanted to claim Iran was supplying weapons to the Shi’a militias, they specifically made mention of “Farsi markings” on them as proof of their Iranian origin. See this story from 2004:
The evidence doesn’t have to make sense, all they care about is convincing their hardcore base so they have supporting voices to shout down opposition. And the media seems to be buying it too, so they obviously have a vested interest in profiting from another war.
What I don’t get is how Cheney and company can think this is a good idea. They do realize that the Iraqi government we’re propping up is going to support Iran in this conflict, right? Violence in Iraq is going to skyrocket after they do this, I guess they’re counting on that spike in violence to prove their point that Iranians are heavily involved there already. I think it will only serve to further turn a disaster-averse public against the losers (our “leaders”) who spark the new violence.
CNN is running a crawl saying this is a “deliberate move by an elite group under the direct control of the Supreme leader. That’s an enormous jump from finding weapons that were bought and then supplied to the Shi’a by some faction.
This must stop. Who can stop it?
This really is what has become so scary in this country…if we had a media and print journalism that were doing their jobs as the 4th Estate all these crazy lies bushco keeps propagating would be shot down right away. If the general public was getting the truth I don’t think we’d be in the mess we are in today-people might really be marching in the streets if they knew the truth.
I blame the bought and paid off media far more than I do bushco for enabling almost gleefully at times(the spectacle of the media almost seeming to relish the ‘shock/awe was sickening) this whole administrations web of lies and deceit.
There’s a reason we rank about 53rd worldwide in freedom of the press.
Tehran denies aiding Iraqi militants
Wonder how they hit on the number, 170….seems so precise doesn’t it. I suspect they threw a bunch of numbers into a hat and pulled out one and went with that.
War With Iran.
It’s a done deal. It’s just a matter of when.
Krugman tells us how it will play out. Read his column, print it out and save it. Or better yet, put it up on your cubicle wall for all the Republicans in your office to read. It will read like a prophecy when the time comes.
A short history of the EDF’s? From 2005,
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001881.html
I started chuckling as soon as I saw the lousy power point graphics. Even the propaganda of this administration is incompetent. Buffoonery.
.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, that U.S. forces have arrested Iranians in Iraq and some of the materials used in roadside bombs had been made in Iran.
“That does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this,” Pace said.
Today a military official on Pace’s staff said the general stands by his comments. Asked if Pace had vetted the information that went into Sunday’s briefing, the official said that Pace was aware of what was going to be presented in Baghdad but that the comment about involvement at the highest levels of Iranian government was not included in the material Pace was given.
…
Sunday’s briefing had been some time in the making. The administration moved to put together its information after Tehran demanded the United States present evidence of its allegations. Defense officials in Baghdad had first put together a larger dossier, but it was rejected by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other administration officials who questioned some of the information in it.
“Questions remain, questions have not been answered,” said Christopher Preble, an analyst at the CATO Institute, a libertarian research group, also noting the unidentified sources at Sunday’s briefing. “At some level, that just seems not very credible to me.”
≈ Cross-posted from Jeff Huber’s diary —
Iran: NYT Repeats History, WaPo Rewrites It ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Typo in title, I shouldn’t blog half asleep …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."