New Evidence Clouds U.S. Case Against Iran

From TPM

Today's Must Read
By Paul Kiel - February 27, 2007, 9:17 AM

New Evidence Clouds U.S. Case against Iran

Two weeks ago, the administration organized an intelligence briefing for journalists in Iraq to show that Iran was providing weapons to insurgents there. The weapons, particularly explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s, were manufactured in Iran, and provided to insurgents by the Quds Force, the anonymous briefers asserted, a fact that meant direction for the operation was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

Well. A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case. There, The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.), troops "uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran." The main feature of the find were several copper liners that are the main component of EFPs. But, The New York Times reports, "while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue."

Among those cloudy items were "cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran."

Possibly, the Times muses, "the parts were purchased on the open market" and then "the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings."

But where were the liners made? The Army captain who led the raid doesn't know. From the Journal:

Capt. [Clayton] Combs said the copper caps were smooth and perfectly symmetrical, suggesting they had been made with a high degree of technical precision. He said he didn't know where the caps came from or whether they had been made in Iran. "That's the hard thing about this war," he said.

 

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