Neocon Iranian Mortar Ruse Fizzles

[Octafish]

The great Kurt Nimmo pegs the, uh, shortcomings in BushCo's sordid story...

Neocon Iranian Mortar Ruse Fizzles

Sunday February 11th 2007, 3:37 pm



Is there something wrong with this picture?

“America today blamed Iran for the deaths of 170 US troops inside Iraq, accusing Teheran of supplying insurgents with increasingly sophisticated bombs,” reports the neocon-infested UK Telegraph, a trusty propaganda tool.

“Senior defense officials in Baghdad said that Iranian-supplied “explosively formed projectiles” were frequently being used against coalition forces” and “the ‘highest levels’ of Iran’s regime were responsible for giving them to Shia militias in Iraq.”

Although the Telegraph does not mention what particular Shi’a group would use the purported Iranian “explosively formed projectiles” against American troops, we must assume they are making reference to Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army. In general, Shi’a militias are too busy killing Sunnis, and vice versa, although late last month the killing of five American soldiers at a supposedly secure U.S. facility in Karbala was blamed on “Iranian intelligence agents in conjunction with Iraq’s Shiite Mahdi Army militia,” according to the Examiner. For some unexplained reason these militant Shi’ites decided to dump the bodies of their victims in the town of Mahawil, a predominantly Sunni area.

But never mind. As the photo above supposedly demonstrates, the Pentagon has seized a number of 81mm mortar rounds, used as roadside bombs. “These bombs are specially designed to penetrate heavily armored military vehicles and are capable of crippling the US army’s main battle tank, the Abrams M1,” the Telegraph ominously reports, or rather reads from a Pentagon script. “They have killed 170 US troops since June 2004, according to the American officials. They added that some weapons have been captured and they bore the hallmarks of having been manufactured in Iran…. Many were made as recently as last year—ruling out the possibility that they could have been left over from the many arms caches scattered across Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Of course, as this is a sloppy neocon ruse, as per usual, there is a problem here. Can you guess what it is?

If you guessed the date, you win a Cupie doll. For some reason the geniuses at the Pentagon have failed to explain why the Iranians used a date from the Christian Gregorian calendar and not one from the Islamic Persian calendar. According to the Muslim calendar, the date stenciled on this mortar shell should read 1427, not 2006. And why did Iran, a country speaking and writing in Persian, a language written in a version of the Arabic script, decide to label their shells in English? Maybe they thought it would fool the infidels?

CONTINUED...

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=764

Gee. Isn't it illegal to lie to the We the People in matters of war?

[gatorboy]

1. Or maybe we're still suppling Iran weapons, Raygun style!

[Octafish]

4. Stingers, Stingers, Who's Got the Stingers?

Some light to explain all the lost helicopters and crews, from Slate via GlobalSecurity.org:

Stingers, Stingers, Who's Got the Stingers?

We gave them to the mujahideen. We sold them to our allies. Will they end up biting us back?

By Ken Silverstein
Slate Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed the mujahideen with deadly Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to battle Soviet aircraft. The Taliban now possess some of those weapons and could use them to shoot down U.S. aircraft in the event of a U.S. assault. But the Taliban aren't the only ones armed with Stingers. Dozens of them have found their way to enemy states and terrorist groups, and other nations have reverse-engineered the weapons to make their own versions of the Stinger.

How many Stingers did the U.S. give to the mujahideen? Who else has them? More to the point, who doesn't? And what sort of danger do they pose for U.S. forces and their allies?

The Stinger is 5 feet long, 2.75 inches in diameter, and weighs 34.5 pounds fully armed. Relatively simple to operate—"the missile's complexity can be accommodated by almost any potential user nation or group," says a U.S. military fact sheet—and with a vertical range of about 10,000 feet, it employs a heat-seeking sensor to home in on an aircraft's engine. The Stinger can be fired from as far away as 5 miles and is capable of bringing down military helicopters, air-fueling tankers, and low-flying warplanes. They're utterly lethal against civilian airliners, which deploy none of the countermeasures found on military aircraft. (Raytheon makes the current Stinger; General Dynamics produced the earlier model sent to the Afghan rebels.)

The decision to send Stingers to Afghanistan was part of a multibillion-dollar U.S. program to arm the mujahideen. The leading advocates came from Congress, notably Sen. Paul Tsongas, D-Mass., who complained that the United States must supply the rebels with high-tech weapons if they were to challenge the Red Army. Opposing the transfer was the CIA, which warned that supplying the mujahideen with Stingers might provoke Soviet retaliation against Pakistan, the base for the CIA's rebel support effort. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, R-Ariz., prophetically worried aloud that the rebels—dominated by Islamic fundamentalists who loathed the West almost as much as they hated the Soviets—might share the deadly Stingers with terrorist groups.

But Congress approved the deal, and the CIA shipped a batch of 300 Stingers to the rebels in 1986 and 700 more the following year. "We were handing them out like lollipops," an American intelligence official later told the Washington Post.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2001/011002-attack03.htm

Pruneface knew how to treat those terrorists. Wish he were still around to testify re "October Surprise."

[Done]

2. Damn...those Iranians are sneaky nt

[Octafish]

6. They held all them hostages just to embarass Jimmy Carter...

...and help elect Ronald Reagan and the warmonger George Herbert Walker Bush...

The October Surprise Mystery

...who begat Baby Doc bin Bush.

[Me.]

3. K & R

Good Stuff

[CabalPowered]

5. What!? The Iranians have adopted English as their official language?

That's crazy. :crazy:

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

7. You know what I love best about Kurt Nimmo?

I love the fact that David Duke is a big fan of Nimmo.

[Octafish]

8. Sorry, I did not know that.

What I do know is that Nimmo wrote the above article in October 2001.

[DearAbby]

9. Do Mortars expire after a certain amount of time?

Do Mortars lose their **BANG** after a certain date? Are they like milk and spoil? Why date a mortar for cripe's sake...'splain that to me.

[seemslikeadream]

10. kick

http://eclectech.co.uk/lovepants.php?i=ceJ