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October 27th,
2007 - Explosive Charge Blows up in US’s Face |
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Explosive Charge Blows up in
US’s Face By Gareth Porter Inter Press Service October 27, 2007 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. British and US officials
observed from the beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely
resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in southern
Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for using them. Hezbollah was known as the
world's most knowledgeable specialists in EFP manufacture and use, having
perfected this during the 1990s in the military struggle with Israeli forces
in Lebanon. It was widely recognized that it was Hezbollah that had passed on
the expertise to Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups after the second
Intifada began in 2000. 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. According to the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz, RPG-29s were imported from Russia by Syria, then passed
on to Hezbollah, which used them with devastating effectiveness against
Israeli forces in the 2006 war. According to a June 2004 report on the
well-informed military website Strategypage.com, RPG-29s were already turning
up in Iraq, "apparently smuggled across the Syrian border". The earliest EFPs appearing
in Iraq in 2004 were so professionally made that they were probably
constructed by Hezbollah specialists, according to a detailed account by
British expert Michael Knights in Jane's Intelligence Review last year. By late 2005, however, the
British command had already found clear evidence that the Iraqi Shi'ites
themselves were manufacturing their own EFPs. British Army Major General J B
Dutton told reporters in November 2005 that the bombs were of varying degrees
of sophistication. Some of the EFPs required a
"reasonably sophisticated factory", he said, while others required
only a simple workshop, which he observed, could only mean that some of them
were being made inside Iraq. 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". In a report on February 23,
NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted "senior military
officials" as saying that US forces had "been finding an increasing
number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but
manufactured in machine shops here". 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. At the February 11 military
briefing presenting the case for this claim, one of the US military officials
declared, "The explosive charges used by Iranian agents in Iraq need a
special manufacturing process, which is available only in Iran." The
briefer insisted that there was no evidence that they were being made in
Iraq. That lynchpin of the
administration's EFP narrative began to break down almost immediately,
however. On February 23, NBC's Arraf confronted Lieutenant General Ray
Odierno, who had been out in front in January promoting the new Iranian EFP
line, with the information she had obtained from other senior military
officials that an increasing number of machine shops manufacturing EFPs had
been discovered by US troops. Odierno began to walk the
Iranian EFP story back. He said the EFPs had "started to come from Iran",
but he admitted "some of the technologies" were "probably
being constructed here". The following day, US troops
found yet another EFP factory near Baqubah, with copper discs that appeared
to be made with a high degree of precision, but which could not be said with
any certainty to have originated in Iran. The explosive expert who
claimed at the February briefing that EFPs could only be made in Iran was
then made available to the New York Times to explain away the new find. Major
Marty Weber now backed down from his earlier statement and admitted that
there were "copy cat" EFPs being machined in Iraq that looked
identical to those allegedly made in Iran to the untrained eye. Weber insisted that such
Iraqi-made EFPs had slight imperfections which made them "much less
likely to pierce armor". But NBC's Arraf had reported the previous week
that a senor military official had confirmed to her that the EFPs made in
Iraqi shops were indeed quite able to penetrate US armor. The impact of those
weapons "isn't as clean", the official said, but they are
"almost as effective" as the best-made EFPs. The idea that only Iranian
EFPs penetrate armor would be a surprise to Israeli intelligence, which has
reported that EFPs manufactured by Hamas guerrillas in their own machine
shops during 2006 had penetrated eight inches of Israeli steel armor in four
separate incidents in September and November, according to the Intelligence
and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv. 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. Gareth Porter is an
historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005. External link: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ27Ak05.html |