Since earlier this year, Bush administration officials and Pentagon spokespersons in Iraq and elsewhere have been claiming that Iran is the source of the explosively formed penetrators, or EFP’s, which have been used in Iraq to penetrate the armor of US military vehicles and kill American soldiers. And despite evidence to the contrary that these weapons are in fact being manufactured in Iraq, they have continued to assert that Iran is the source of these weapons.
Indeed, this charge that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, has been providing EFP’s to Iraqis, was one of the bases for the State Department’s official designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards elite Qods Force as a terrorist organization, which was announced by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice yesterday. Never before have any part of a sovereign nation’s military been so designated by the United States, a move, by the way which could be used by President Bush to justify a future attack on Iran.
Now, journalist and commentator Gareth Porter has posted a report entitled “Explosive charge blows up in US’s face” which alleges that the United States military has known for some time that Iran is not the source of the EFP’s being used in Iraq, but chose to repress this information and present false reports of Iranian involvement under orders from the White House. These damning allegations, if true, would give the lie to one of the principal supports for the Bush administration’s media campaign to paint Iran as the primary disruptive force in the Middle East; namely that Iran is behind the attacks on, and deaths of, US soldiers in Iraq (via The Asia Times). An excerpt from that report follows:
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WASHINGTON – When the United States military command accused the Iranian Quds Force in January of providing the armor-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing US troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.
The record also shows that the US command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi Army of Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had received the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah, rather than Iran.
The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale for the present aggressive US stance toward Iran. Although the George W Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are responsible for arms that are killing US troops. […]
US intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of Mahdi Army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shi’ite fighters had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials.
In late November 2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN and the New York Times that Hezbollah troops had trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi Army fighters in Lebanon.
The fact that the Mahdi Army’s major military connection has always been with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armor weapon. Although US military briefers identified it last February as being Iranian-made, the RPG-29 is not manufactured by Iran but by the Russian Federation. […]
After British convoys in Maysan province were attacked by a series of EFP bombings in late May 2006, Knights recounts, British forces discovered a factory making them in Majar al-Kabir north of Basra in June.
In addition, the US military also had its own forensic evidence by the autumn of 2006 that EFPs used against its vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq, according to Knights. He cites photographic evidence of EFP strikes on US armored vehicles that “typically shows a mixture of clean penetrations from fully-formed EFP and spattering …” That pattern reflected the fact that the locally made EFPs were imperfect, some of them forming the required shape to penetrate but some of them failing to do so.
Then US troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that US troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered “a pile of copper discs, five inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order” […]
Nevertheless, the Bush administration decided to put the blame for the EFPs squarely on the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, after Bush agreed in autumn 2006 to target the Quds Force within Iran to make Iranian leaders feel vulnerable to US power. The allegedly exclusive Iranian manufacture of EFPs was the administration’s only argument for holding the Quds Force responsible for their use against US forces.
In short, Hezbollah, an organization with ties to Muqtada al Sadr and the Mahdi Army, supplied the training and technology necessary to make EFP’s years ago. Muqtada al Sadr and his organization are Iraqi nationalists and have generally remained independent of Iran. The Mahdi Army is the primary Shi’ite militia and political party which has opposed Prime Minister Maliki’s government. Its adversary among the Iraqi Shi’a population is the Badr Corps, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main backer of Maliki’s government, which does have close ties to Iran. Indeed, the Badr Corps fought on behalf of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It is the Badr Corps which makes up a significant portion of the Iraqi Police, and its fighters have been trained and supplied by the US military in Iraq and by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In brief, the Iraqi militia most closely tied to Iran is also the one most closely tied to the United States.
So, the record shows that the Shi’ite group most closely aligned with Iran, SCIRI and it’s militia the Badr Corps, is also the main US ally among the Shi’a. The Shi’a militia which has most often been at odds with the United States (and at times actively engaged in military confrontations with US forces), is the Mahdi Army and its leader, Muqtada al Sadr. The Mahdi Army has in the past received training and support from Hezbollah, and it considers SCIRI and the Badr Corpsand SCIRI to be its main adversary. And now it appears that the US military knew all along that EFP technology had been given to the Mahdi Army years ago by Hezbollah, and that most if not all EFP’s used against our troops are being produced inside Iraq. Indeed, Iran supports the Shi’a organizations in Iraq which make up the core faction of the current Iraqi regime, and which the US has also supported, trained and equipped. The Iraqi Shi’a who have not been fighting us in other words.
Yet the US military in Iraq, and Bush officials at the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, have continued to assert that it is Iran which is behind the use of EFP’s against our troops in Iraq. In short, they have been actively deceiving the American public and Congress in order to further the agenda of the Bush administration to provoke a military confrontation with Iran.
As Gareth Porter demonstrates in his story, several reports have exposed the falsity of these claims. For example, in February of this year Jane Arraf of NBC filed a report which indicated that, despite the military’s claims of Iranian manufacture of EFP’s, many EFP factories inside Iraq had already been discovered by US forces. Yet despite all the reports which indicate that the US military and the Bush administration are all wet when they seek to blame the EFP problem on Iran, the dominant media narrative continues to be the formed around their continued assertions that Iran is providing the armaments that are killing our troops:
The Arraf story was ignored by the news media, and the Bush administration has continued to assert the Iranian EFP charge as though it had never been questioned.
It soon became such an accepted part of the media narrative on Iran and Iraq that the only issue about which reporters bother to ask questions is whether the top leaders of the Iranian government have approved the alleged Quds Force operation.
All I can add at this point is that I simply do not trust the veracity of any claim made by the Bush administration these days. They have consistently lied and misled the American people so many times over the last nearly seven years that to accept what they say at face value on any issue is foolish and unreasonable. And especially when it comes allegations which could be used to justify more wars, I am particularly skeptical. Gareth Porter’s article is well researched and documented, something I cannot say for the continued assertions by the White House that Iran is the greatest threat to world peace since — well, since Hitler.
Yet for some reason much of our mainstream media continues to unquestionably repeat the narratives that the administration pushes on them with little or no investigation into the truth or falsity of those “stories.” One can only speculate as to why a press corps that was so relentless in its investigations of the previous Democratic President, now feels no need to challenge the Republican who now holds that exalted office, despite the fact that he has repeatedly misled and deceived them, and through them the American public, time after time after time.
I do know this: if the media doesn’t start challenging his administration’s unfounded allegations and begin actively investigating the truth behind the spin this administration keeps putting out regarding Iran, we will shortly find ourselves in another war, one that will once more put our soldiers in harms way based on lies, half truths and falsehoods. That war, the one that Dick Cheney has eagerly anticipating and promoting for at least the last 4 years, will have consequences that will irrevocably alter our nation and the world, and not for the better.
