Remember those EFP's that could only come from Iran?

For about two weeks the Bush administration has been pushing the media to report that the explosively formed penetrators (EFP's) that were so high tech that only Iran could be supplying them to the insurgents. Forget that the technology is over 30 years old and is known by every major army in the world that might face tanks. This is supposedly so high-tech that no nation in the Middle East except Iran could produce them. Right?

Well, Paul Kiel at TPM Cafe provides this news:

"A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case. There, The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.), troops "uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran." The main feature of the find were several copper liners that are the main component of EFPs. But, The New York Times reports, "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 those cloudy items 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."

Possibly, the Times muses, "the parts were purchased on the open market" and then "the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings."

But where were the liners made? The Army captain who led the raid doesn't know."

OK. So the casing is PVC pipe. That's the same stuff that is used in waste water drains from every house built in the U.S. in the last thirty or more years. The pipe and the end caps to seal off the rear can be purchased in Home Depot, Lowes or any decently supplied hardware store in the U.S. or its equivalent anywhere in the world.

The explosive can be Viet Nam era C4. It's easily (and safely) placed inside the PVC pipe and shaped by hand. It's about like Playdough. Just don't forget to drill a hole in the cap on the PVC pipe and place the igniter at the bottom before placing the explosive in on top of it, with the wire leading out through the hole in the cap on the pipe.

The copper or aluminum top on the EFP can be machined to fit the pipe and formed into a bowl shape exactly like the metal of an automobile fender is shaped. Even the famed Trabant which was built for over 40 years in the USSR and east European Communist countries could do that machine work with little difficulty. India's automotive industry could easily do it. Making the EFP's is really that simple.

Yet somehow the Bush/Cheney administration is using the existence of these EFP's as proving that (Shiite) Iran is building them, supplying them to the (Sunni) insurgents so that they can be used against the American armored Humvees. Oh, and since the Iranians are supposed to be doing this, supposedly this showed that the top leaders of Iran were responsible.

The New York Times published the following information on February 11, 2007:

In a news briefing held under strict security, the officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.

That inference, and the anonymity of the officials who made it, seemed likely to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and perhaps even trying to lay the groundwork for war with Iran.

For anyone who has followed the "Scooter" Libby trial, this is obviously an attempt by the administration to feed the Press vague and unsubstantiated assertions that Iran is responsible for the failures of the Cheney/Bush administration. They have to find someone else to blame for the failures in Iraq since it obviously can't be the brilliant idea of attacking the nation of Iraq so that by some conservative "magic" the whole Middle East will become more America-friendly, quit hijacking airplanes and bulding nuclear weapons, and perhaps even give us their oil.

The problem seems to be that even though Dick Cheney and his cabal of true-believers know how to solve all the foreign policy problems America has - and the solution is to bomb our enemies into a state of fear so that they have to be our friends.

Somehow Cheney et. al. have found that most other people do not see the enlightened wisdom they are peddling, they spread lies and half-truths so that the nay-sayers will become so afraid that they will agree to the use of their sons and daughters as cannon-fodder in the armies that Cheney wants to keep on deploying.

These stories of EFP's from Iran and the related fantasies that the top leaders of Iran are responsible for them are just more Cheney-lies designed to frighten Americans into joining Cheney and his crew in their fool's paradise Hell.

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See prior posts on this subject.

• "Anyone can make an EFP"
  02-16-2007
• Are the EFP's actually from Iran? Or is it another Bush effort to start a new war?
  02-15-2007