U.S. ties Iranian leader to bombs killing U.S. troops

Nope!

Yesterday’s comments came from Canberra, Australia

Today’s are from JAKARTA, Indonesia

Reading is fundamental!

 

at least he's switching the words up a little bit more now...............

 

Yeah, I'm sure the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has no idea what's going on.

 

This is American Might and Nobility:

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--
From a proud brother of a US Marine...part of the greatest and most noble fighting force in the history of the world.

 

If we are going to fight wars over lies, death of these servicemen and women is probably the biggest mortal sin any US leader can make. And to not even be HUMBLE and say that he is totally screwing us up in the eyes of history and the present world is being blind to the facts and the truth.

And now he is looking to Iran to start some more crap? Crying wolf again?

Listen...

Iran can have all the evil intentions they want. I bet you if we try diplomacy and make it clear to them what CAN STILL BE UNLEASHED even with the Iraq War going on...I am sure they will come to their senses.

Play the video, baby!

 

From today's press gaggle --

Tony can't seem to get his story straight --

HENRY: “…the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit.” Are you saying that you, from this podium, know more than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

SNOW: I am telling you what the intelligence indicates. And…

HENRY: So, was he not in the loop? I’m just trying to understand why there’s a contradiction, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs –

SNOW: There’s not — Ed. Calm down. I know you’re excited. Your voice is rising, your pace is increasing.

HENRY: I’m not. I’m telling you that –

SNOW: I’m telling you —

HENRY: He’s saying this. I’m not.

SNOW: No, I’m telling you, I talked with him. Ok. I’ve talked to him since –

HENRY: Well, we’ll follow up with him as well.

SNOW: You better.

+++++

SNOW: Uh, that, in fact, you’re going to find that we generally agree on — we agree on the basics of the situation here, which is, there are armaments that have made their way from Iran into Iraq. There are Iranian forces in Iraq. These weapons are being used to kill Americans and we’re going to do everything we can to protect our people.

HENRY: On the substance of it, the briefers over the weekend said, um, that these parts are sent to Iraq with the approval of senior Iranian officials, and the bottom line is, he seems to be contradicting that.

SNOW: Well, I think what Gen. Pace may have been saying — in fact, I know he’s saying — he is — and this is where we get to the rhetorical question I was asking you before. Do we have a signed piece of paper from Mr. Khamenei or from President Ahmadinejad signing off on this? No. But are the Quds Forces part of the army — part of the government? The answer is yes. So the question is, I think this ends up being a semantic dispute about senior levels of the government or the government. And the fact is, the government knows about it.

HENRY: But is it really a question about whether or not you have strong evidence, when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff seems to be saying something different than the White House, does that raise questions about how solid this evidence is?

SNOW: No, because you got — you’ve got — you have explosively formed penetrators. He says they exist, correct?

HENRY: Well, I don’t see that in this particular quote, but I —

SNOW: Well, no, no. He said that there’s, there are weapons that are coming from Iran —

HENRY: He says that there are projectiles manufactured in Iran.

SNOW: Alright, so, ok, so there’s no doubt about that, correct?

HENRY: Right.

SNOW: There are Iranians in Iraq. There’s no question about that, correct?

HENRY: Sure.

SNOW: Alright, so where’s the credibility problem, in terms of the — are you saying –

HENRY: In terms of the Iranian government being behind it. That’s not — nobody’s disputing whether it’s manufactured in Iran. That’s what you keep changing what my question is.

SNOW: No, no, I’m trying to clarify your question, because I think this is the –

HENRY: I don’t need it clarified. I’m trying to tell you — I know what my question is, and basically, he’s saying that he doesn’t see evidence that the Iranian government is clearly behind it. That’s my — I’ve asked that three or four times, you haven’t answered that.

++++

REPORTER: But it seems to be a reasonable expectation that the American people can have to get some kind of explanation for how you can have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the administration on two separate pages.

SNOW: We’re not on separate pages. The explanation is –

REPORTER: (Inaudible)

SNOW: Because everybody’s trying to get into semantic –

REPORTER: Yesterday, you said the administration is confident the report on Iran is accurate and the weaponry is coming with the knowledge of the Iranian government.

SNOW: With the government, yeah, and I still –

REPORTER: But now you’re says the Quds Forces, which is part of the Iranian government. You’re sort of parsing.

SNOW: Well, I was parsing yesterday. I’m trying to be careful about how we do this. The question is, do we know that some particular senior official signed off? No. It’s an opaque government. It’s not a transparent government.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/13/snow-iran-intel/

 

Yikes!

Looks like Tony (who use to hammer the White House when he wasn't on his knees) has taken lessons from old Karl Rove, huh?

 

What if America is the one supplying the weapons?

 

CentCom Commander: ‘I Have No Idea’ If White House Iran Claim Is True

On Sunday, anonymous administration officials presented evidence purportedly showing that weapons have been smuggled into Iraq with “the approval of senior Iranian officials.” Yesterday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace seemed to contradict this claim, saying that he has not seen evidence that the Iranian government “clearly knows or is complicit” in the weapons smuggling.

Today on CNN, CentCom Commander William Fallon, the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, was asked about the administration’s claim. Fallon said, “I have no idea who may be actually with hands-on in this stuff.”

Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/

 

from josh --

We're just listening to the Bush press briefing today. And he's telling reporters that he knows absolutely tha the Iranian Republican Guards are responsible for sending in the weapons that are now being used against US troops. There are some delicate word games involved. But that's what he's saying.

He's saying he knows as a certainty something that his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not willing to say he believes.

-- Josh Marshall

 

Well now you've put me in a quandry..

 

We've been here before --


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The Iran innuendo continues. In his press conference today, President Bush said that the U.S. knows "with certainty" that the EFPs coming in from Iran for attacks on U.S. forces originate with the Qods Forces -- a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That's nothing new: Sunday's briefing made the same allegation. What came next is:

Bush declares himself deliberately agnostic as to why these Iranian munitions are in Iraq and who the Iranians may be giving them to. This is, however, the central issue at hand: not whether the al Quds force is operating with or without the approval of the Iranian government, but whether the al Quds force itself is actually responsible for arming fighters using the weapons against American soldiers and marines.

At stake is whether or not the Iranian government is pursuing what amounts to an act of war against U.S. troops.

Any number of alternative explanations are possible: renegade Qods Forces could be trying to make money on the lucrative Iraqi black market for weapons. Iran could simply be arming its Shiite proxies in the civil war as opposed to seeking attacks on U.S. forces. And those proxies could in turn be unloading some of the weapons on the very active black market. (Remember, some of them were discovered in December at a compound belonging to U.S. "partner" SCIRI.) An element of the Qods Forces could be attempting to attack U.S. forces without the knowledge of their leadership. And so on. These are contending theories that require additional information to be compelling. And there should be some explanation of why most of the deaths of US forces from these IEDs are coming from Sunni insurgents who are opposed to the people Iran supports -- a fact that some believe points to the black market.

Three things are significant about this. First, it's deliberately an argument by innuendo. Without specifying even what the U.S. is alleging about Iran, viewers (and journalists) are invited to draw their own inferences -- inferences understandably likely to be alarming. Second, we've been here before. It's exactly the sort of innuendo put forward by the administration before the Iraq war, when officials endlessly told us that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "in Baghdad" -- and so we were to believe that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had the sort of operational relationship they never had.

Finally, these two points represent something of a gauntlet to administration critics. It becomes incumbent on them to make the case that the Iranian government isn't involved in attacks on U.S. forces. Bush, on the other hand, takes the posture that he won't wait for dangerous threats to gather until they're perfectly clear. It's an emotionally compelling stance. Unfortunately, we've seen its effects in Iraq for the past four years.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002572.php

 

Glenn Greenwald responds to glenn reynolds --

Extremist Bush supporter calls for murder of scientists
(updated below)

Whenever you think that Bush followers cannot get any more depraved in what they advocate, they always prove you wrong. This is what University of Tennessee Law Professor and right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds said today about claims by the administration that Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents (claims which, needless to say, he blindly believes):

Just think about how extremist and deranged that is. We are not even at war with Iran. Congress has not declared war or authorized military force against that country. Yet Reynolds thinks that the Bush administration, unilaterally, should send people to murder Iranian scientists and religious leaders -- just pick out whichever ones we don't like and slaughter them. No charges. No trial. No accountability. Just roving death squads deployed and commanded by our Leader, slaughtering whomever he wants dead.

To get a sense for how profoundly violative of our political and military traditions such proposals are, one can review this comprehensive report on the history of American law and foreign assassinations, authored by Nathan Canestaro, a member of the Afghanistan Task Force of the CIA (he also, ironically enough, graduated University of Tennessee School of Law). Every U.S. President since Gerald Ford -- including Ronald Reagan -- has either issued or left standing an Executive Order which expressly provides:

Every administration, Democratic and Republican, have agreed that creating death squads and engaging in extra-judicial assassinations is so repugnant to our political values and so destructive to our moral credibility around the world that an absolute ban is necessary -- including at the height of the Cold War, as we battled the "evil empire" which had thousands of nuclear-tipped warheads pointed at numerous American cities.

As Canestaro notes, it was the U.S. which was the first country to formulate a legal code of military conduct for use by soldiers in wartime, and the first Order on assassinations was issued by Abraham Lincoln (General Order 100) in the midst of the Civil War. It provided:

Consistent with American tradition, international treaties, with virtual unanimity, deplore extra-judicial assassinations as the tools of savages and barbarians.

And what is most striking is that these anti-assassination prohibitions apply (a) to wartime and (b) even to foreign leaders of nations who are at war. But here, Reynolds is actually advocating that we murder scientists and religious figures who are "radical," whatever that might happen to mean in the unchecked mind of George Bush.

If we are to be a country that now sends death squads into nations with whom we are not at war to slaughter civilians -- scientists and religious figures -- what don't we do? American credibility in the world has fallen to literally unimaginable depths over the last six years, but it is critical to remember that with a President never to face the electorate again, many Bush supporters -- and certainly the White House itself -- are headed in the direction of increasingly extremist and bloodthirsty measures. And it is hard to overstate what a complete disregard they have -- really an intense contempt -- for the values that have long defined this country.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/02/13/assassination/index.html

 

BTW

I just watched today's press conference and I can faithfully say that Bush has lost his mind.

 

Oops!

via TPM --

I don't know if it all get lost in the flurry of news about the bombing in Afghanistan or the massacre in Iraq. But the White House's Iranian made weapons story seems to have collapsed. As Paul Kiel notes in this morning's Must Read, stories in today's Times and Journal detail a new raid on a makeshift weapons factory in southern Iraq. It turns out this makeshift factory in Iraq was making those super-IEDs that we were told could only be made in Iran. And the parts the Iraqis were using to make the bombs?

Shipped from factories from around the Middle East, but not Iran.

Oh well.

-- Josh Marshall

The WSJ article --

http://users2.wsj.com/lmda/do/check...117254247709420157.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us


The Times article --

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/w...d06186157&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

 

basso- I mostly browse the D & D and honestly do not know the answer to this question, so forgive me if it widely is known: Do you work for the Bush Administration?

 

Iraqis, Iranis...same difference!