Posted by
on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:17:23 AM
Oops. Who's head is going to roll over this story?
(HT: John over at PowerLine)
U.S. officers said Monday they had discovered a factory for assembling sophisticated roadside bombs from Iranian-made components _ the first such facility uncovered in a religiously mixed province north of Baghdad.
The officers, who displayed weapons for reporters at a U.S. base in the capital, said the find provides more evidence that the Iranians are providing weapons used to kill Americans. They include EFPs _ explosively formed projectiles _ that fire a slug of molten metal capable of penetrating armored vehicles and have been blamed for killing more than 170 U.S. and coalition soldiers since 2004.
The display was the latest in a series presented by the U.S. military to bolster its allegation that Iranian weapons are being supplied to Shiite militias. Iran has denied the charge, and some private defense analysts say Iranian weaponry is widely available on international arms markets. U.S. ordnance experts maintain that the workmanship on component parts is uniquely Iranian and too high in quality to have been copied by Iraqi extremists without access to advanced machinery.
Military officials said the cache _ buried in two freezers and a water container, with some of the rockets covered by tarps _ was the largest of its kind to be found north of Baghdad.
"This is a significant amount," said Capt. Clayton Combs, the commander of the company that found the cache in the volatile Diyala province. "Before we have found one or two EFPs at the most and those are usually at the site of deployment. This is the first cache ... that has actually been found as far as a production facility."
As if that weren't bad enough, CNN reports that we have a couple of interesting individuals in custody in Iraq:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. troops in Iraq are holding a top leader of an Iranian special forces group believed to be supplying weapons to insurgents who are targeting and killing U.S. forces in Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday.
Brig. Gen. Mohsen Chirazi, said to be the third-ranking officer in the Iranian Quds Force, was arrested in late December during a raid at the home of a man connected to the leader of the top Shiite party in Iraq with deep ties to the Iranian government, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, according to U.S. officials.
The Quds Force is a paramilitary arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and has helped direct attacks on Iraqi and U.S. forces inside Iraq, President Bush, Defense Secretary Gates and other senior military leaders have said.
U.S. officials would not say where the general is being held in Iraq. The arrest was among the first in a series of raids and arrests by U.S. forces on Iranians in Iraq, who the United States blames for meddling in the security situation inside that country. --From CNN Pentagon Producer Mike Mount (Posted 12:55 p.m.)
A weapons plant and cache plus the Iranian general? Wow. But the surge isn't working, as we're told by the Left repeatedly. It must almost be the suicide kiss of death for them proclaiming one thing only to have the facts come out, and prove them wrong, again.
Seriously though, this is a significant find for us. It further proves Iran's involvement in this war. And picking up the general and his group was no easy task, to be sure. But now we've got something we can dangle in front of the world and go "See, they're lying about being there. I wonder what else they may be lying about, now?" I'd love to be a fly on the wall during those interrogations because the general might just start singing. And I'm sure Ahmadinejad isn't too happy about this. Whoever was in charge of that operation might want to stay out of sight, lest he lose his head.
Publius II