on us..with help from the Chinese? Iran doesn't manufacture weapons, does it?
Iran repainting Chinese weapons, smuggling them into Iraq
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
BAGHDAD — U.S. military officials said Iran has supplied Chinese-origin weapons to insurgency forces in Iraq. The U.S. military has found caches of Chinese weapons modified in and smuggled by Iran. Officials said they included 107 mm rockets as well as 60 mm and 82 mm mortars."Most of the 107
rockets we see are Chinese manufacture, Chinese origin," Maj. Marty Weber told a U.S. military briefing in Baghdad on April 11. "But what we see is, we will see Iran buy them, and then they will repaint them, remark them and then sell them on the open market for themselves."
The officials said the weapons were refurbished and then provided to Shi'ite and some Sunni insurgents in their war against the U.S.-led coalition.Iran has also sent its own weapons to insurgency groups in Iraq,
officials said. They cited the 81 mm mortar, manufactured in Iran, Middle East Newsline reported. Weber, an officer from the U.S. Army's 79th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, displayed Chinese weapons said to have been manufactured in 2005. He said Iran has been an importer of Chinese ordnance."Most of this region uses 82 mm mortar rounds, not 81 mm mortar rounds," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell
said. Iran has also smuggled weapons made in Bulgaria to insurgency groups in Iraq. Officials cited rocket-propelled grenades and light ammunition, which they said contributed to a rise in U.S. casualties.
"We do have an increase that we have seen, obviously, in coalition force casualties that have occurred over the last 30 days," Caldwell said. "And it's something we anticipated could occur as we had more forces down inside the city and greater numbers than previously were operating there before. So we knew
that was a possibility."
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/07/front2454222.0493055554.html
U.S. Briefing on Iran Discredits the Official Line
Analysis by Gareth Porter
02/14/07 -- - WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (IPS) - The first major effort by the George W. Bush administration to substantiate its case that the Iranian government has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shiites who oppose the occupation undermines the administration's political line by showing that it has been unable to find any real evidence of an Iranian government role.
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The EFPs used against U.S. and British troops in Iraq were the centrepiece of the briefing. But the anonymous U.S. officials did not claim that the finished products have been manufactured in Iran. Instead they referred to machining of EFP "components" -- referring to the concave metal lids on the devices -- as
being done in Iran.
That position parallels the testimony by Gen. John P. Abizaid on Mar. 16, 2006 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which claimed only that "sophisticated bomb-making material from Iran has been found in improvised explosive devices in Iraq".It also raises an obvious question: if Iran has the technical ability to supply the complete EFPs, why are only components being smuggled into Iraq?
The absence of shipments of complete EFPs suggests that the components that have been smuggled in have been manufactured in small workshops outside the official system. Knights, the most knowledgeable and politically neutral source on the issue, says these components could have been manufactured by a "small
handful of external bomb-makers". He notes that the only source to claim that the Iranian defence industry is the source of the EFP components is the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran.
The U.S. briefers argued that EFPs are not being manufactured within Iraq. The New York Times quoted a "senior military official" as saying that they had "no evidence" that the machining of components for EFPs "has ever been done in Iraq".
But Knights presents evidence in Jane's Intelligence Review that the Iraqi Shiites have indeed manufactured both the components for EFPs and the complete EFPs. He observes that the kind of tools required to fabricate EFPs "can easily be found in Iraqi metalworking shops and garages."
He also notes that some of the EFPs found in Iraq had substituted steel plates for the copper lining found in the externally made lids. Knights calculates the entire production of EFPs exploded thus far could have been manufactured in one or at most two simple workshops with one or two specialists in each -- one in the Baghdad area and one in southern Iraq. "I'm surprised that they haven't found evidence of making EFPs in Iraq," Knights told IPS in an interview. "That doesn't ring true for me." Knights believes that there was a time when whole EFPs were imported from outside, but that now most, if not all, are manufactured by Iraqis.
Taking into account the false notes struck by the anonymous officials, the damaging admissions they made and the absence of information they needed to make a case, the briefing appears to have been a serious setback to the administration's propaganda campaign. It will certainly haunt administration officials
trying to convince Congress to support its increased aggressiveness toward Iran.
http://www.truthout.org/article/gareth-porter-us-briefing-iran-discredits-official-line
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