Rightwing Dishonesty And The Irbil Five

By Steve Hynd

Various rightwing blogs are getting all steamed up over Obama's release of the "Irbil Five", Iranians who were arrested and held without charge for years by US forces in Iraq. The charge is being led by The Corner's Steve Schippert and utterly-nutterly Andy McCarthy.

McCarthy writes that the five were "Quds Force commanders from Iran�s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who were coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that have killed hundreds � yes, hundreds � of American soldiers and Marines" using Iranian-designed Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) devices."

The trouble is, every single word of that allegation is almost certainly false.

For a start, the Irbil Five are claimed to be Quds Force commanders solely on the say so of Mujahedeen e-Kalq informers who fingered them for the U.S. The MeK, a proscribed terrorist organisation with an Islamist/Marxist ideology and a long history of lying about Iran's allegedly hostile activities who believe they should be the autocratic rulers of Iran, have long been the neocons favorite terrorists and a neocon journalist, Ken Timmerman, even reported that MeK interpreters had led the interrogation of the Irbil Five. Everyone else says they were diplomats, in Iraq at the express invite of Kurdish and Iraqi leaders. They'd met with the Iraqi President, Prime Minister and National Security Advisor, openly and with televised soundbites.

Secondly, the claim that EFP's are exclusively the property of Iran is just stupid. These same weapons were first used by the IRA and spread to Columbia's FARC and Spain's ETA as well as Hizboullah and other terror groups worldwide years before the US-led invasion of Iraq. They are easy to make in any minimally equipped machine shop and at least three manufactories for EFP's have been found inside Iraq itself. When the US tried to prove that Iran was responsible for these weapons, the whole world laughed. Not a single EFP has ever been intercepted crossing the Iran-Iraq border, even though one entire regiment of British troops spent months actively looking. And the Pentagon's ever-evolving explanations of contrary evidence have descended to fairy tales that contravene the laws of physics. Even General Pace and Admiral Fallon refused to get onboard the neocon warmongering train - which later cost both their jobs.

To date, the only positive evidence for Iranian involvement in and leadership of EFP attacks in Iraq are: confessions delivered by MeK and Iraqi Army interrogators under conditions of extreme duress; explosives that the US military says it knows are Iranian because they're in fake US wrappers and scoring marks on EFP discs caused by the manufacture process which the US military says must be Iranian because they say the Iraqis can't machine discs on their own (despite there being plenty of machine shops in Iraq and the formulas used being widely spread by the IRA in the 90's); other weapons that the US military knows are Iranian because they have serial numbers on (and they never think that maybe that means rogue elements redirecting arms exports, since the Iranian government are clever enough at black ops to take the serial numbers off). That's it.

The same story has been tried in Afghanistan, but despite repeated claims by neoconservative pundits and Bush administration officials that Iran was arming the Taliban in Afghanistan with EFP bombs, neither the US Army's own bomb expert in theatre, NATO allies nor the commanding US general agreed with that assessment.

Thirdly, there's the "responsible for ten percent of US casualties" charge. The actual figures are 8% of fatalities and 4% of woundings attributable to EFPs, most of which are certainly made inside Iraq with open-source design details. These attacks were never the difference between success and failure in Iraq. Even without them, Iraq would have been a quagmire. And readers might note that no-one ever gives statistics on the number of deaths attributable to weapons smuggled from Saudi, the UAE, Syria or even Pakistan. Maybe those are big problems, bigger than the EFP one, but who can tell? Without something to compare EFP casualties to, it's smoke and mirrors. In fact, common or garden truck and car bombs are the biggest source of US deaths in Iraq and always have been.

Lastly, there's the whole notion that Obama releasing these most-probably innocent diplomats who have close ties to Iraq's President, Prime Minister and bi-partisan leadership is "stunningly irresponsible". McCarthy, naturally, doesn't mention the fact that the Bush administration released over 500 detainees from Gitmo without any kind of trial or due process and that even the Bush administration admitted that a percentage of those became terrorist threats thereafter. It's "stunningly irresponsible" when Obama does it but when Bush did, IOKIYAR.