War Stenography

By Cernig

Michael "Judy In Drag" Gordon today re-earned his place as the Bush administration's stenographer-in-chief with an anonymously-sourced report alleging that Iran is using Hezboullah as a proxy to train other proxies among Iraq's Shiite militants. Glenn Greenwald writes:

As usual with Gordon's articles, nothing is done here other than uncritically repeating Bush administration claims under the cover of anonymity. Virtually every paragraph in this article is nothing more a mindless recitation of uncorroborated assertions which he copies from Bush officials and then weaves into a news narrative, with the phrase "American officials say" tacked on at the end or the phrase "according to officials" unobtrusively interspersed in the middle.

With the fact that this might as well be an official White House briefing taken for granted, Dr. iRack at Abu Muqawama blog writes that he suspects the claims are still "at least mostly" true. However, even "at least mostly" leaves a lot of gap for the most important aspect of the story, the intent of the Iranian leadership, as well as particular details of the "evidence", to fall through.

Dr. iRack notes that:

existence of 2008 vintage Iranian weapons per se is not evidence of direct involvement by the Iranian government (or the Quds force), since they theoretically could have been sold on the black market.

But sources outwith the White House indicate that such trade is more than simply theoretical. Ever since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the regional black trade in arms has been at an all-time high. From Pakistan to the Lebanon, prices for weapons have more than tripled since the invasion of Iraq. Three Pakistani arms-dealers were among the first arrested when the Iraqi Army moved into Basra recently - presumably selling the wares of Pakistan's huge cottage-industry arms bazaars who boast they can copy any weapon so well, right down to the markings, that even its designer cannot tell the diference. American weapons such as Glock pistols which were "mislaid" in Iraq in 2004 have turned up, by the score, in the hands of Kurdish terrorists and even ordinary criminals in Turkey - yet no-one is accusing the U.S. government of deliberately aiding such groups. These arms travel through the region along Silk Road smuggling paths which were old in Jesus' time, making a joke of secure borders. Just as was the case with many missing American items in Iraq, these trades are often fuelled by individual officials enriching themselves by surreptitiously selling off their national arsenals or re-directing imports to the benefit of their own offshore bank accounts. Evcery nation in the region, too, sells weaponry - home produced and imported for re-export - to anyone who wants them. Shipments of arms by the Saudi government have turned up in Iraq too, to rather less publicity than Iranian ones.

Indeed, the black/gray market arms trade in the region is so huge, so pervasive, so impossible to curtail, that the burden of proof must rest on the accuser to show, beyond all doubt, that any arms available were deliberately provided with meddling in mind rather than simple entrepreneurship. As Sadrist spokesman Salih al-Ubaydi told reporters on 30th April:

the presence of Iranian weapons in Iraq is "quite normal," since Iran "sells weapons to anyone who wants, and the Al-Sadr Trend, Al-Qaeda, and the parties in Iraq's political process [a reference to the Badr Corps] have Iranian weapons." He added, "Therefore, it is quite natural to find Iranian weapons because they are bought and sold and any party can buy them."

Which would certainly explain why Badr Corps members of the Iraqi security forces find it so easy to lay their hands on caches of Iranian arms. It also partly explains why the Iraqi government can question whether concrete proof of Iranian arms in Iraq is the same as concrete proof of the Iranian leadership's malicious intent. (The other aspect of that questioning being that the Iraqi government knows full well that the groups most aided by official Iranian support are members of the ruling coalition.)

This new concentration on the source of conventional arms such as guns, rockets and mortar bombs is a departure from the previous Bush administration narrative too. In the past, finds of such arms have been incidental to claims that iran was manufacturing and importing EFP (explosively formed penetrator) bombs into Iraq with the express purpose of killing U.S. troops by proxy. While that's still a facet of U.S. allegations, it seems to no longer be the main thrust of them - unsurprisingly, since claims of a purely Iranian origin and evil intent for such weapons have undergone extensive evolution since the abortive Baghdad Briefing in January last year and still have even more holes in them than the narrative on conventional weaponry finds.

Most media reports simply repeat administration claims that EFP's have unique markings identifying them as Iranian. But those markings aren't serial numbers or coded makers marks - they are purely scoring made by the precision tools used to make the penetrator "lids". The claim that these scorings show Iranian origin is based on the claim that Iraq has no indigenous capability for such work - but Iraqi agents have turned up at trade shows the world in the past two years boasting of Iraqi industry's expertise in precision tooling as part of the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Worse, factories for making EFP s have been found inside Iraq. U.S. officials claim that Iraqi-made EFPs are poor copies of the Iranian ones, with metal being heated on domestic stoves then poured instead of machined - but no domestic stove in the world can heat the metals used to the temperature needed to melt them. It takes at least an industrial gas furnace and carbon block to do that - in fact, machining them is an easier job.

In other words, there are very good reasons to be sceptical of American "evidence" for Iranian meddling as well as the logic by which they describe it as deliberate meddling rather than simple, corrupt, private entrepreneurship. The same holds true of claims of Hizboullah and Iranian training camps for Shiite militiamen.

As commenters at Abu Maqawama have noticed, while the U.S. is being vocal about these training camps, very little is being said about which militias are supposedly involved. Only "special groups" are being spoken off, and the unspoken implication is that these are Mahdi Army members - but "special groups" is actually a catch-all term describing insurgents from any Shiite militia who carry out attacks on U.S. forces. It's worth noting too that militia members have also said that they have to pay to be trained in these camps - hardly a sign of a delibertate leadership policy of meddling and far more a sign of private entrepreneurship again.

The Mujahedeen e-Kalq, an Iranian resistance group designated as a terrorist outfit by the U.S. but accorded protection inside Iraq by U.S. forces is most famous for bringing original news that Iran had a nuclear program to the world. It has also, on many occasions, made it clear who it thinks are the main Iranian proxies in Iraq - and described those proxies as receiving training from Hizboullah members at camps inside Iran. In March of this year, FOX News analyst and former MeK spokesman Alireza Jafarzadeh told reporters:

the Iraqi militias are trained under the command of IRGC Brig. Gen. Mohammad Shahlaei, a veteran commander of the Quds Force in the Ramezan base. Based on information he received from the MeK in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operates a number of secret bases where Iraqi terrorists are trained.

Among them are the Imam Ali Base in northern Tehran's Alborz-kooh Street, north of Saad-abad Palace; south of this base is another IRGC base called "Al-Zahra." It is designed to train women. According to the MeK, "there are many veteran instructors in Imam Ali base, with extensive experience in terrorist activities. The base is under the command of a Revolutionary Guard officer named Hossein Lotfi."

Trainees are divided into small groups of eight. Each group has two trainers, an Iranian and a Lebanese member of Hezbollah. The training lasts 20 days. The personnel are instructed not to speak to anyone about training Arabs.

He also identified the militias involved:

Iraqi militias affiliated with the Quds Force, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- SCIRI -- the Badr Corps, Hezbollah, Islamic Revolution Mujahedin, and Seyyed-ol-Shohada Movement have traveled to Iran in groups and are being trained in various camps of the Quds Force.

The trainings includes urban guerilla warfare, instruction on use of light and semi-heavy weapons, mortars, missiles, sniping techniques, use of explosives and firing shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles.

Needless to say, these groups are all staunch allies of Nour al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

The MeK's allegations are highly relevant in the context of American claims - because it is likely they have one and the same source.

In February last year, notorious neoconservative shill Kenneth Timmerman reported for the rightwing NewsMax magazine that:

The U.S. government, aided by an intelligence specialist from an Iranian opposition group, continues to interrogate Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers arrested in Irbil in northern Iraq on Jan. 10.

NewsMax learned about the interrogations from Iranian exiles in Europe and the United States.

...Iranian sources have identified three senior Revolutionary Guards officers among the captives and said they have described Iranian terrorist networks in Iraq during interrogations led by an intelligence expert from the opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq group. [emphasis Mine - C]

It had previously been known that MeK -provided interpreters worked with U.S. military intelligence in Iraq - but the provision of interrogators is another ball of wax entirely. Does anyone seriously doubt that such an involvement is designed to give U.S. officials plausible deniability if "enhanced techniques" disallowed by the military's field manual are used? Is anyone surprised that such interrogations by members of an Islamo-marxist messianic cult with hopes of ruling Iran obtain confessions that confirm iranian malicious intent in Iraq?

In short, there are good logical and evidentiary reasons to be sceptical of the Bush administration's narrative on Iran, and I'm sure that the American intelligence community is very aware of them - but those reasons are being overlooked in the rush to catapult the narrative and create a pretext for tough talk...probably even a pretext for airstrikes. The intelligence is being fixed around the policy again.

Comments

[Ron Beasley]

As many of us have been saying all along we are in the mess we are in because of the corporate media. It's not just been "War Stenography" but stenography in general. The corporate media has as much responsibility for the occupation of Iraq as Dick Cheney and GWB.

[Cernig]

Agreed, Ron - and they're doing more of the McSame with the Presidential idol race too.

Regards, C