Call The Fraud Squad
In their headline CNN says: U.S. ties Iranian leader to bombs killing U.S. troops. If you read the report you have to accept so many unsupported claims to get there that I have a bridge I what to talk to you about as soon as you get your fortune from Nigeria.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The U.S. military Sunday presented evidence it says shows an elite Iranian force under the command of Iran’s supreme leader is behind bombings that have killed at least 170 U.S. troops in Iraq.
U.S. officials have made general statements in the past year about Iranian involvement in Iraq, but haven’t provided many details.
The charges came at a Baghdad briefing by a senior defense official, a senior defense analyst and an explosives expert, all of whom asked to remain unnamed.
Juan Cole has a slightly different headline: NYT Falls for Bogus Iran Weapons Charges. The professor looks at the casualty reports and says no way, uh-uh, not even close.
While I don’t expect reporters to know it, but the whole world uses 81mm mortars, including the US and UK, and given that Iran and Iraq fought a decade long war, there is plenty of ordnance from both countries in both countries. If the US had guarded Saddam’s weapons storage areas we wouldn’t be dealing with this level of violence.
Iraqis don’t need help to create weapons. The army that Bremer dispersed had munitions people, explosive ordnance disposal people, engineers, artillery, tankers, etc. who all know how to make things, including tanks, go boom. After Gulf War I do they expect people to believe that the Iraqi army didn’t study how to disable Abrams tanks?
None of the people involved will identify themselves and take responsibility for what they are saying. The media isn’t allowed to photograph the “evidence” and submit it for review by experts. The briefing is in the controlled environment of the Green Zone. This is garbage.
2 comments
…I found this morning’s report on NPR’s “Morning Edition” to be particularly interesting. As Steve Inskeep talked with the reporter covering this bizarre “background only” anonymous press conference, Jamie Tarabay, it was pointed with a great deal of skepticism that the same Iranian connection has been charged on more than one occasion going back to last fall. You could clearly hear the sort of disbelief about the sincerity of the unnamed officials and their “important” but unseen proof that we all complained about the media lacking on the runup to the Iraq invasion. It was rather refreshing…
It seems that at least NPR has been embarrassed by their conduct as cheerleaders and are starting to act like journalists, but the New York Times is still carrying pompoms for the Shrubbery.