US Agrees to New Talks With Iran

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

US Agrees to New Talks With Iran

Tuesday November 20, 2007 7:01 PM

By MATTHEW LEE

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States has accepted
an Iraqi proposal to hold new talks with Iran about
the security situation in Iraq, the State Department
said Tuesday.

The as-yet unscheduled meeting would be the fourth
round of talks between Ryan Crocker, the U.S.
ambassador to Iraq, and his Iranian counterpart. Two
previous sessions ended inconclusively with Iran
rejecting U.S. allegations that Iran is supporting
Shia insurgent groups in Iraq by providing bombmaking
material responsible for the deaths of American troops.

Amid a decline in attacks involving such devices,
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said
Washington had responded favorably to a suggestion
from the Iraqi government that it was now “the
appropriate time” for another meeting at the
ambassadorial level in Baghdad.

“We said 'yes,' that we would agree to that,” he
told reporters, adding that the United States had
informed Iran of its acceptance through diplomatic
channels that normally involve Swiss intermediaries.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7091516,00.html

[mrfixit]

1. Are U.S. allegations against Iran unsupported?

Take a look. Maybe YOU can tell me.

Do think it would matter AT ALL if they realized that the entire world KNOWS that they are not telling the truth?

"Two previous sessions ended inconclusively with Iran
rejecting U.S. allegations that Iran is supporting
Shia insurgent groups in Iraq by providing bombmaking
material responsible for the deaths of American troops."

http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=11816
US Military Ignored Evidence of Iraqi-Made EFPs
by Gareth Porter

"The record also shows that the US command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi army had gotten the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah rather than Iran."

"The fact that the Mahdi army's major military connection has always been with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armor weapon."

"By late 2005, however, the British command had already found clear evidence that the Iraqi Shi'ites themselves were manufacturing their own EFPs. British Army Major General J. B. Dutton told reporters in November 2005 that the bombs were of varying degrees of sophistication. Some of the EFPs required a "reasonably sophisticated factory," he said, while others required only a simple workshop, which he observed, could only mean that some of them were being made inside Iraq."

"Then US troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that US troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered "a pile of copper discs, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order."

In a report on Feb. 23, NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted "senior military officials" as saying that US forces had "have been finding an increasing number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops here."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6353489.stm
US claims against Iran: why now?
Analysis
By Paul Reynolds

"Scepticism

Against the inference that this all comes from Iran is the concept that Iraqis themselves would be capable of copying a design and therefore do not need to get bombs from Iran.

And there have been a number of news reports over the last year expressing scepticism, even among military personnel, about the link to Iran.

The Washington Post reported last October that British troops in the south doubted the claim.

A year ago, the London Times said that British officers in Basra had stopped making any such claim, saying only that the technology matched bomb-making found elsewhere in the Middle East, including Lebanon and Syria."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12139
IED Lies
by Milan Rai


"It was claimed in the New York Times that: ‘The manufacture of the key metal components required sophisticated machinery, raw material and expertise that American intelligence agencies do not believe can be found in Iraq.’(9) In the Guardian, this gloss was offered: ‘The briefers claimed the deadliest of the roadside bombs being used in Iraq were from Iran: the machine-tooling was so sophisticated that the only place it could have been done in that part of the region was Iran.’(10)



In the June 2006 Daily Telegraph report that first revealed the use of EFPs in Iraq, however, it says only that: ‘this newspaper understands that Government scientists have established that the mines are precision-made weapons which have been turned on a lathe by craftsmen trained in the manufacture of munitions’.(11)



No evidence has been produced that out of all the countries in the region, only Iran possesses ‘lathes’ and ‘operators trained in the manufacture of munitions’. No evidence has been produced that Iraq lacks these ingredients for the production of EFPs. As for the ‘raw materials’, there is no lack of metal tubes or explosives in Iraq. An independent assessment of IEDs in Iraq, obtained by Defense News in 2006 and based on British military intelligence, said, ‘Based on current usage, there are enough stocks of illegal explosives to continue the same level of attack for 274 years without re-supply.’(12)



Anthony Cordesman, the respected US military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, responded to an earlier version of this claim by observing that Iraq's insurgents are probably just tapping a pool of common bomb-making technology, none of which requires special expertise: ‘There's no evidence that these are supplied by Iran. A lot of this is just technology that is leaked into an informal network. What works in one country gets known elsewhere.’(13)"

(9) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/world/middleeast/10weapons.html?hp&ex=1171170000&en=e9a9ae56cb1df98a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
(10) http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2010948,00.html
(11) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/25/wirq225.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/25/ixnews.html
(12) http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=1495759&C=landwar
(13) http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175195,00.html

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

2. "WMD!" "Electricity!" "WMD!" "Electricity!"

"WMD!" "Electricity!" "WMD!" "Electricity!" "WMD!" "Electricity!" "WMD!" "Fuck off!" "DIE!!!"