ABC News has posted on their website what it claims is an exclusive report, the implications of which are pretty chilling. Dunno if this is old news (if it is, I'll happily delete), but if I do actually get to cry BREAKING!, then check
this out:
March 6, 2006 -- U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.
They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops' strongest armor.
More on the flip.
The report, by Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, and Jill Rackmill, builds what passes for a meticulous case in these latter days of journalistic decadence:
What the United States says links them to Iran are tell-tale manufacturing signatures -- certain types of machine-shop welds and material indicating they are built by the same bomb factory.
"The signature is the same because they are exactly the same in production," says explosives expert Kevin Barry. "So it's the same make and model."
and asks the reader to make his/her own conclusions about who's responsible:
"I think the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there," says Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief and an ABC News consultant. "I think it's very hard to escape the conclusion that, in all probability, the Iranian government is knowingly killing U.S. troops."
and, naturally, they bring in some stalwart voices of American democracy to bolster the article's premise:
John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Februrary 2, saying, "Tehran's intention to inflict pain on the United States and Iraq has been constrained by its caution to avoid giving Washington an excuse to attack it."
All snarkiness aside, there's every possibility that these stories are true. If so, it could mean a lot of things. One of our friends at Powerline had this to say:
JOHN adds: Isn't this an act of war?
Damn, I hope not. But damn, Bush is desperate.
