Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 27, 2007
By James Glanz and Richard A. Oppel Jr.
BAGHDAD, Feb. 26 — In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.
Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.
“I’ve lost good friends to these E.F.P.’s,” said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. “And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.”
The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.
But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.
Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, “Leave your number and we will call you back.”
Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that despite those confusing new elements, the United States has been cautious in how it has presented the possible evidence of Iranian involvement.
“The case that has been made has been very careful and very restrained,” Mr. Cordesman said. “If this is unrealistic, it can’t be blamed on the intelligence community. This has had the highest possible policy level review, and credibility on an international level is clearly the major criteria in reviewing everything that was said.”
Other analysts have expressed skepticism that the American military has made a strong case for the Iranian origin of the E.F.P.’s as tensions are running high between the United States and Iran over its nuclear program.
Items in the cache included the concave copper dishes called liners that cap the canisters and roll into deadly armor-piercing slugs when the explosive detonates. There were also various kinds of electronics, presumably for arming and triggering the devices, the PVC tubes, and two types of rockets and mortar shells that Major Weber said had markings and construction that identified them as being Iranian in origin.
The PVC tubes, of several different sizes, appeared to be fittings of the kind of used to splice two stretches of PVC tube together in routine applications.
“It’s worth pursuing that it’s machine-made and you can track the country of origin,” said Maj. Jeremy Siegrist of the First Cavalry Division. “And it’s manufactured for a specific purpose.”
That raised the possibility that the parts were purchased on the open market and that the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings.
Captain Combs said the cache was hidden in buried freezers and an 80-gallon water container. “What they couldn’t bury, like the 122-millimeter rockets you see in front of you, was covered in tarps,” he said.
February 27, 2007
By James Glanz and Richard A. Oppel Jr.
BAGHDAD, Feb. 26 — In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.
Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.
“I’ve lost good friends to these E.F.P.’s,” said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. “And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.”
The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.
But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.
Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, “Leave your number and we will call you back.”
Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that despite those confusing new elements, the United States has been cautious in how it has presented the possible evidence of Iranian involvement.
“The case that has been made has been very careful and very restrained,” Mr. Cordesman said. “If this is unrealistic, it can’t be blamed on the intelligence community. This has had the highest possible policy level review, and credibility on an international level is clearly the major criteria in reviewing everything that was said.”
Other analysts have expressed skepticism that the American military has made a strong case for the Iranian origin of the E.F.P.’s as tensions are running high between the United States and Iran over its nuclear program.
Items in the cache included the concave copper dishes called liners that cap the canisters and roll into deadly armor-piercing slugs when the explosive detonates. There were also various kinds of electronics, presumably for arming and triggering the devices, the PVC tubes, and two types of rockets and mortar shells that Major Weber said had markings and construction that identified them as being Iranian in origin.
The PVC tubes, of several different sizes, appeared to be fittings of the kind of used to splice two stretches of PVC tube together in routine applications.
“It’s worth pursuing that it’s machine-made and you can track the country of origin,” said Maj. Jeremy Siegrist of the First Cavalry Division. “And it’s manufactured for a specific purpose.”
That raised the possibility that the parts were purchased on the open market and that the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings.
Captain Combs said the cache was hidden in buried freezers and an 80-gallon water container. “What they couldn’t bury, like the 122-millimeter rockets you see in front of you, was covered in tarps,” he said.