Two separate news outlets have revealed the source of those shaped-penetrator super-IEDs that some anonymous official claimed could only come from Iran. Surprise, it wasn’t Iran. The work was done by Iraqis working with material supplied from places in the middle east that don’t lie directly to Iraq’s northeast.
Free advice to anybody who took these reports seriously – when administration officials insist on anonymity for no discernable reason, and when official spokesmen start passing the buck even before the full ridiculousness of the claims comes to light, it means that even they know they are full of shit. Count on it.
jg
Trusted sources won’t point out that the reports are full of shit so the fact that they are full of shit is sadly irrelevant. They sure sound truthy though.
Marcus Wellby
The two seperate news outlets don’t matter. Its what the others reported, however wrongly, that will be used in future press releases supporting the case for war.
False claims are fed to media outlets now so that they may be used as reference at some future date. See Miller, Judith.
Zifnab
At least they’re consistant.
dreggas
Wait for it…someone will be along soon to say that the reports out now prove nothing and that despite being a homegrown factory it was set up by Iranians with parts brought in by them from throughout the ME just to put up a smokescreen.
I honestly wonder how that type doesn’t get nauseous from all the spinning they have to do to continue to buy what this admin is selling.
Punchy
It’s obvious those IED-making Iraqis are just trying to sell some books….
John S.
Because for the Darrells of the world the only thing that matters is how the ‘lefties’ are wrong.
RSA
Never underestimate the trickiness of the
IraqiIranian leadership.ThymeZone
Are these the IEDs that say “Made In Iran” and have the Underwriter’s Labaoratories seal on them?
Bubblegum Tate
…but we’re still going to bomb the shit out of Iran, right?
Andrew
Come on guys, silly Arabs are so backwards that the couldn’t possibly stick some c4 in a tube and stick a copper plate on top. Only the greatest Persian minds could develop such an advanced device!
RSA
I wouldn’t put anything past the inventors of “algebra”. Note how Middle Easterners continue to corrupt the minds of our youth.
Sherard
Tim, you SERIOUSLY need some help with reading comprehension. “It wasn’t Iran”. Hhhmm… they might not ALL be from Iran, and “some of the components might not be from Iran.” Or so quotes your second hand (as usual) source. God forbid you actually do the research and attribute facts to the WSJ and NY Times yourself.
Zifnab
Winner.
jenniebee
I blame the Russians. I’m old fashioned that way.
les
Sherard, exercise your comprehension here, and then shut up. The things are so simple to make, you can’t tell where they come from. Contra the “so sophisticated, has to be Iran” slop you’re swallowing.
Tim F.
Sherard,
Let’s try a fun exercise. Just because you like me so much, list every single datum of evidence that exists for the idea that Iran is aupplying super-IEDs to insurgents. Short list, isn’t it? It looks like the only thing on there is the unsupported inference from unnamed officials that these things are so sophisticated, they must come from Iran. That’s a logical inference that one can disprove by showing that Iraqis can make themselves. And lo, the Iraqis did make high-quality IEDs themselves. That makes the unnamed official’s logical inference, as he no doubt knew at the time, utterly full of shit.
But hey, thanks for playing. Your cheery goodwill always brightens up the place.
dreggas
I guess I qualify for the boobie prize then but all we get around here are boobs.
Perry Como
I wonder which is more complex: Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program activities or super-IEDs?
Rudi
The grey PVC tubes are high pressure plumbing supplies. Not high pressure in a sophisticated explosives sense, but high pressure like for kitchen sinks or lawn sprinklers. The copper plates are all over ME bazaars and markets, only Persians have markets(?). Has anyone heard from McGyver, is he now part of the Jihad? First Cat Steven’s, then Casicus Clay and now McGyver, these Persian are truly evil.
Unum
What amazes me about all this “Iranian” influence is that the deaths of American soliders in Iraq attributable to possible Iran interference is around 10%. If that is true then why are they so upset about Iran?
While Saudi Arabia is funding the Sunnis who actually are killing our American troops but no one is threatening them.
Then there’s Syria…they have a weapons pipeline to Iraq and yet they are not singled out either.
It looks to me that Bush & Co is looking for any excuse to invade Iran. Again, evidence of incompetent and reckless policy coming from the White House. Oh, how I long for the days of “shuttle diplomacy” and heck, even Nixon is beginning to look like a good president now.
Paddy O'Shea
Big rumor today is mainland China has put a credit hold on the U.S. due to their now precarious economy. Expect our govt to go into seizure within the next 6 weeks.
Lee
Tim F,
So it must be Intelligently Designed!
Sri Ramkrishna
Greetings, first time I’m posting, been lurking for months I think.
Paddy O’Shea:
Do you have a link stating that rumor regarding the credit hold? That would be pretty serious rumor since the dollar value is going to plummet. My guess if OPEC moves to Euro we are going to see some hell here.
sri
dreggas
Hopefully it is just rumor. If it’s true and given what happened in China today and as a result what happened in our own markets, things may not be pretty very soon.
Pixie
I was really disappointed when Michael Weir jumped all over this.
Tsulagi
Shortened for clarity. Simple facts do not need additional wordiness.
But sometimes really smart admin officials do put their name and face all over their
liesclaims. See Condi and the evil ALUMINUM TUBES! that she screeched about for months claiming they had only one purpose. To jumpstart a smoking gun mushroom cloud.That our own nuclear experts, IAEA, and anyone else with a clue called bullshit, that those tubes couldn’t work even in the 50’s design centrifuge they claimed, that just meant more proof that Saddam was hiding their evil intent.
Zifnab
It’s less a “rumor” and more a “400 point faceplant in the DOW”.
Punchy
It’s also PATENTLY clear that not only is Iran supplying IEDs to Iraq, they’re also supplying a huge amount of negative numbers to our Dow.
Fucking bastards. Bring it on, Rugs.
grumpy realist
There was a correction in the Dow today, long overdue. Anyone with any sense has already been out of the market or hedged so many ways it makes no difference.
Jake
Clearly this is another hatchet job by the librul MSM. Any minute now we’ll hear that the bombs found in the bomb factory were just planted there by the diabolically clever Iranians in an attempt to throw us off the scent.
Any minute now…
Kirk Spencer
re the 400 point faceplant, most of the causes were home grown, not Chinese. To put it simply, a whole bunch of bubbly in housing has recently popped, and it’s finally showing up in the stock market.
Not to say the fun and games in China didn’t help it along, but if it were China’s actions the drop would have happened a lot earlier than 2pm eastern.
Other candidates for trigger include Fannie Mae tightening subprime requirements today, or it might have been the release of way lower than expected Durable Goods. Or maybe the confirmation that the 4th quarter GDP of 3.5% is indeed going to be revised downward by a lot.
There are a lot of candidates for trigger. Frankly, what surprises me more is that it only dropped as little as it did.
cleek
luckily i cashed-out my 401k last week!
oh wait, no i didn’t.
RSA
Do you mean “have a seizure” or “be seized by creditors”? Could be either, I suppose, with equal likelihood.
dreggas
I just qualified to participate in my company’s 401k, what a wonderful time to start…
Punchy
400+ in one day a correction? I’m not so sure. A few days steady decline says correction. This was more China-panic, IMO.
Basically, everyone over the age of 6 EXCEPT the Bush Admin realizes that China holds our collective economic scrotum in their hands, and today they squeezed a little…
Can I say “scrotum”?
Perry Como
Don’t worry, when China attacks Taiwan we’ll be debt free.
Andrew
Wait, who’s gonna pay for our bullets?
demimondian
Punchy’s right. 400 point reversals are not corrections, although they’re awfully alarming. What they are is a sign of toppiness — when the market starts spitting reversals out, prices have become unstable, and will soon fall.
China’s threat is sort of emtpy, folks. US debt is always issued in dollar denominations — if China tries to put the squeeaze on US, we inflate our currency. Hey presto, China holds less debt. (Yes, the PRC holds a lot of dollars. Yes, they can slow the debasing of the currency. If they do that, though, George Soros is going to make a lot of money really fast; the yuan is currently vastly undervalued against the dollar, and a sharp inflationary spike would only exacerbate that. Currency traders would have a field day arbitraging that.)
Tulkinghorn
These were the ones with the date of production listed the exclusively American order of month-day-year, as in 10-28-06. Sheesh.
Zifnab
Oh great, now I’m not allowed to view this blog at my local library. Thanks.
And written in English, if I’m not mistaken. Or at least, not written in Farsi. Which is somewhat of a deal-breaker for anything manufactored in Iran.
But, of course, that doesn’t really prove anything. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absynth!
dreggas
Mmmmmm Absynth, if only the wife would let me order some again.
Rome Again
Speaking of the Dow sell-off, Jim Cramer of Mad Money just went insane, stating he thought it was a computer glitch and that a keypuncher recorded a sale that was misreported as much higher than it was supposed to be??? OMG!
ROTFLMFAO – yeah right Jim, dream on!
jake
[scoffs] Certainly not. You are supposed to say Hairy Bags of Life Juice, just like your granny taught you.
Heathen.
RSA
Hmm, I read that “Hairy Bags of Lice Juice”, which is possibly even more disgusting. Thanks for the imagery.
Carol H
Hey, Jenniebee, you are more right than you know. My son is currently deployed with the Army in Ramadi and part of his job is searching for IEDs. He says they find ones made in Iran but they find them from all over. Iran, Syria, Jordan, and of course Iraq itself, but the most common country of origin is Russia. He doesn’t know why, that’s not part of his job, but he thinks it might have something to do with the Russian ones being cheap.
rachel
The insurgents are smart shoppers? What a surprise!
John Spragge
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.
If the neo-cons, enablers, and others who advocated the Iraq “liberation” really just made a mistake, the time has come for them to apologize and to make way for more competent people. If they will not, the world will know that they care more about their egos than about the twenty million Iraqis whose hopes for a better future they betrayed, the twenty million Afghanis whose hopes for a better future they betrayed, the three hundred million Americans whose credit they have mortgaged, the three thousand plus (and counting) Americans who have given their lives for no discernible gain, and the uncounted Iraqis and Afghans who have also paid the ultimate price.
As the war in Iraq, which your leaders entered against the advice of million of the world’s people, blunders on towards it fifth year and second country, I can see no equivocation, no excuse, no possible explanation left for the arrogance, incompetence, or the profligacy with blood and treasure. Two years ago, with this appalling bloodshed still in its infancy, I wrote that the grief for the young lives snuffed out transcends politics. Two years later, I still believe that, only now I find plenty of rage left over for politics.