Independent: Congress To Probe"IED's from Iran" Claim

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Congress probes 'IoS' revelations on IRA link to Iraq
It was just another St Patrick's weekend in Washington. The Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern presented shamrock to President George Bush, the Northern Ireland political parties continued to bicker over who is responsible for the latest impasse, and green beer was drunk by the gallon. This weekend, however, a new cloud hangs over the legacy of the Troubles and the alleged role played in a number of deaths by both American and British security agencies.

The claim - if true - threatens a new political storm over how and why FBI officials and MI5 operatives conspired to supply deadly bomb-making equipment to the Provisional IRA in the early 1990s, mechanisms the paramilitary organisation later shared with Palestinian fighters. Today in Iraq the same technology is being used by insurgents to kill and maim British and American soldiers. Six months ago, when The Independent on Sunday first broke the story, the Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, was forced into a humiliating retraction.

For weeks his officials had claimed that bombs which killed eight British soldiers in separate attacks in Basra had been supplied to foreign fighters by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Our story showed that the technology, far from being new, had in fact first been used in Newry, Co Down, in 1992 to murder a policewoman and maim her male colleague.
Kevin Fulton, a former soldier who infiltrated the IRA on behalf of the security services, made an astonishing claim: that he had flown to New York, met FBI and MI5 agents and was given money to buy an infra-red device to be used to set off IRA bombs.

(snip)
Now I've a couple of points to make here.

Bush and his administration used the claim that Iran was responsible for these IED's in Iraq only recently, fully aware that back at the close of last year the UK Defense Minister had made a retraction of the same claim.

For the first time I am aware of, it is now alleged that Bush Senior's FBI were involved in the original botched sting that led to the IRA gaining this design.

According to the newspaper, a senior IRA member has confirmed their part of this story - including that they shared the design with other terror groups.

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http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2006/03/article-congress-to-probe-bush-ieds.html

Independent article
Congress probes 'IoS' revelations on IRA link to Iraq
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article352175.ece