Lieberman-Kyl vs. the Evidence

The Lieberman-Kyle amendment has just passed the Senate overwhelmingly after two sections were removed to satisfy Democrats that it will not serve as a backdoor authorization for war against Iran, using U.S. forces operating in Iran. Even after that compromise, it remains a poison chalice, because it endorses a set of "findings" that are fundamentally false and which are being used by the administration to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy toward Iran .

The amendment is based on the Bush administration's proxy war narrative which has been filling the news media for the past nine months. It cites General Petraeus's classic statement of the proxy war argument of September 12: "[I]t is increasingly apparent...that Iran through the use of the Iranian Republican [sic] Guard Corps Quds Force, seeks to turn the Sh'ia militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq".

It is not unreasonable to view the proxy war narrative as the equivalent for Iran of the infamous White House Iraq Group's carefully contrived -- and stunningly successful -- fall campaign in 2002 to prepare public opinion to support an invasion of Iraq.

The following six points summarize some -- but certainly not all -- of the evidence contradicting the line on which the poisonous Liberman-Kyl amendment is based.

1. The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.

o At the February 11, 2007 briefing, officials displayed one EFP and some fragments but did not claim that there was any forensic evidence linking that or any other AFP to Iran.

o One of the briefers admitted that it was only Iraqi smugglers who brought weapons into Iraq, explaining why no direct Iranian involvement could be documented.

o The official briefer who was a specialist on explosives, Maj. Marty Weber, claimed in a later interview that the use of "passive infrared sensors" in the deployment of EFPs in Iraq was "one of the strongest markers of Iranian involvement" in the traffic. But he admitted in the same interview that the electronic components needed to make the sensors found in Iraq were "easily available off the shelf at places like RadioShack.

o Another official who participated in the briefing, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, denied that the military was claiming that Iran was behind the traffic in arms to Iraq. He said in a follow-up press briefing on February 14, "What we are saying is that within Iran, that these EFP component parts are being manufactured. Within Iran weapons and munitions are being manufactured that are ending up in Iraq. And we are asking the Iranian government to assist in stopping that from happening. There's no intent to do anything other than that."

o Although one of the official briefers said shipments of EFPs had been intercepted at the border in 2005, only one press report about such a border interceptions has appeared, and there was no indication that such interceptions had produced any evidence of Iranian involvement. On the contrary, it quoted "coalition officials" as saying there was "no evidence to suggest that the government in Tehran is facilitating the smuggling of shape charges into Iraq." Despite that alleged interception, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and Brig Gen. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Staff, continued to deny any knowledge of official Iranian complicity in EFP or any other arm supplies.

o Despite interrogations since last spring of a top official of an alleged Iraqi EFP network and the Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the organization, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. Commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a July 6 briefing that his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran"

o On September 8, the commander for the northern region of Iraq, Maj. Gen. Thomas Turner II, admitted in a press briefing, "I don't think we have any specific proof of Iranians in our area other than reports. We have discovered caches....It has not been a lot. We have seen some evidence of some weapons that were employed against coalition forces that were made in...Iran, where they are coming from across the border, we're not sure."

o Despite the assertion by Gen. David Petraeus on September 12, quoted in the proposed Lieberman-Kyle amendment, that the U.S. military obtained evidence of the complicity of Iranian officials in arming and training Shiite militias from interrogations of the above detainees, it has not produced wither detainee or any transcript of the interrogations. Nor has it released a direct quote from either detainee. No apparent intelligence reason exists for withholding such evidence from Congress and the public.

o Despite Petraeus' assertion in September that the United States obtained "hard evidence" incriminating Iran from computer hard drives seized when the above detainees were captured March 22 , none of the documentation has been made public, nor have any specifics have been provided on what the files show. Earlier both Petraeus and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had discussed the contents of the 22-page memorandum as detailing the planning preparation, approval and conduct of military operations by the Shiite militia organization but without claiming that it showed any Iranian role in any of those activities.

2. The U.S. intelligence community has not endorsed the argument being made by some in the Bush administration that the Iranian government was responsible for the rise in Shiite military activity in Iraq.

o The National Intelligence Estimate, a brief summary of which was released to the public February 2 contradicted the official argument, stating, "Iraq's neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics."

o Instead of stating clear that Iran had provided weapons or training to Shiite militias, the NIE offered a more ambiguous formula that "Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq." That formula, according to veterans of the NIE process, probably represents a negotiated compromise, indicating that some agencies refused to endorse the claim that Iran was supply weapons to Iraqi Shiites.

3. The main argument made in the February 11, 2007 briefing for an Iranian official role in providing EFPs to Shiite militias -- the allegation that only Iran had the capability to manufacture EFPs or components for EFPs that can penetrate U.S. armor -- was quickly proven to be untrue.

o As early as mid-2005, U.S. military intelligence officials had already concluding that they believe the technology for making such armor-penetrating bombs was "spreading among a variety of insurgent groups," obviously including Sunni insurgents with no ties to Iran or Hezbollah. At least one insurgent cell in Baghdad was already "attempting to make the charges locally."

o Israeli intelligence reported that Hamas guerrillas manufactured high grade EFPs during 2006 which were used in attacks on Israeli Defense Forces in four separate incidents in September and November 2006. The shaped charges penetrated eight inches of steel armor.

o Senior military officials in Baghdad told a reporter days after the February 11 briefing that U.S. forces had been finding an "increasing number of advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops." One official was quoted as saying that the impact of those Iraqi-machined EFPs on armored vehicles "isn't as clean but they are almost as effective" as the EFPs being imported.

o Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in February that in November 2006 U.S. troops raiding a Baghdad machine shop had discovered a pile of copper discs "stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order"

o Maj. Marty Weber, the explosives expert who was one of the three briefers in the February 11 briefing, admitted in an interview with The New York Times less than two weeks later that "You can never be certain" that the cooper discs for the EFPs could not be manufactured with the required precision in Iraq.

o U.S. troops found a cache of components, including concave copper discs, for making EFPs in February 2007, in which the PVC tubes of varying widths appeared to have come from the open market, raising the likelihood that the liners were being manufactured locally so that they would be the right size to fit the discs.

o Another bomb-making factory discovered by U.S. troops in late February was reported to have forced U.S. officials to "reassess their belief that such bombs were being built in Iran and smuggled fully assembled into Iraq."

4. U.S. and British Military officers and civilian officials have expressed doubt that EFPs and other armaments in the hands of Shiites have actually come from Iran or that Iranian Quds force personnel have been involved in the supply.

o British Defence Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in August 2006, "I have not seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated armed support on Iran's part in Iraq."

o Lt. Col. David Labouchere, commander of a few hundred British troops which began in late August 2006 to search the Iran-Iraq border for evidence of Iranian supply of weapons to Iraqi Shiites, said in October, "I suspect there's nothing out there. And I intend to prove it."

o "[S]ome military analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence of...a link" between the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Shiite militias fighting U.S. troops, according to a Washington Post report published August 20, 2007.

5. The Quds Force of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the administration has claimed is the instrument of the alleged Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq, has apparently been withdrawn from Iraq.

o In the same testimony to the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees on September 11 in which he stated the proxy war argument, Gen. David Petraeus also said, "[T]he Qods Force itself -- we believe, by [and] large, those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity.

6. There is a substantial body of evidence that the Hezbollah in Lebanon -- not Iran -- has been the main source, if not the only source, of EFPs and other weapon used by Shiite militias in 2006 and 2007.

o Hezbollah was using EFPs to attack Israel Defense Forces armored vehicles as early as 1997 and provided EFP expertise to Palestinian militant groups after the start of the Intifada in 2000 (Michael Knights, Jane's Intelligence Review).

o Iraqi and Lebanese officials told a reporter in mid-2005 that Iraqi Shiite fighters had begun in early 2005 "copying Hezbollah's techniques in building roadside bombs and carrying out sophisticated ambushes." Those Hezbollah techniques included "shaped charges" (later renamed explosively formed penetrators by U.S. officials), according to those same officials.

o Hezbollah's CD-Rom instructional videos were captured in Iraq rather than Iran's, according to Michael Knights.

o All of the weapons systems captured in Iraq that are alleged to have been provided by Iran, including EFPs and 240 mm rockets, have been in the Hezbollah arsenal, as indicated by many sources on the weapons used by Hezbollah against Israel.

o One of those weapons systems, the RPG-29, which was used by Shiite militias against an American M-1 tank, is not manufactured by Iran and is known to have been acquired by Hezbollah from Syria rather than from Iran.

o There was reportedly intelligence in 2006 that Iran shipped machine tools to Lebanon that could be used to make EFPs.

Comments

[altohone]

Congress is full of warmongers eager to carry out imperial domination.

Every single Democrat that voted for this measure (list please btw) should be replaced for repeating the lobbyist influenced group-think errors that caused our country to start an illegal war of choice once already.

Our country deserves fact-based policies, not spun snowjobs.

[bringbackimus]

I hear that the alleged "anti-war" candidate, H. Clinton, supported the Lieberman/Kyl amendment.

[avvorio]

Think Joementum and Kyl should be the first to suit up for this battle.

[mommadona]

YES!

Oh, lets. Let's make that a part of their job description....!

"All members of the Executive Branch, House and Senate must report for active duty in the infantry within 48 hours of signing legislation that allows 'controlled conflicts', otherwise known as 'war'.

Size of the 'war' does not matter.
They all are committed to one year service.
Period.

There. THAT would stop these little p-ing contests.

[leftcoastindy]

Wow, What a surprise. You mean the Cons are cherry picking and misconstruing the evidence?

They would never do that.

Well, except maybe in the runnup to the Iraq invasion.

Please tell me we aren't stupid enough to fall for the Neocon BS again.

[cynara]

"Please tell me we aren't stupid enough to fall for the Neocon BS again. "
Hillary is. Obama knew better, but was too much of a coward to even vote against it.

[cognate]

If you were occupying Jerusalem, and an unfriendly country was setting up its own Jerusalem (= Qods or Quds) Force, wouldn't you be agitating that America bomb them?

[villastrangiato]

Israel is rumored to have more than a hundred nukes - to say it's an unfair playing field in the middle east is just a slight understatement. Israel's call for bombing Iran is utterly arrogant and utterly typical. But regardless of the nuke issue, Israel's main concern is being overrun by the Arab population - that's why they've been desperately importing jews from around the world for years - trying to disguise the obvious apartheid situation. Ultimately, Israel will be swallowed up by its neighbors as South Africa was swallowed up. It may take some time, money, and blood - but Israel is fighting the tide and both it and Iran knows this.Iran doesn't need nukes. All they need to do is keep harping on the world about Israel's abuse of human rights. Hezbollah is just there to make life a bit miserable for the Israelis. They will never be liberators - only the Palestinian people can make that happen.

[FlowerGirl]

Illegally occupying!

[springsm]

"Even after that compromise, it remains a poison chalice, because it endorses a set of "findings" that are fundamentally false and which are being used by the administration to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy toward Iran."
Well for pete's sakes ..is this is so poisonous and nothing has been proven, why in the hay did these dems "overwhelmingly" pass this stuff. My gawd. Will somebody explain this. please.

[jsarets]

In electoral politics, everything is judged from good to evil, and positions are distributed on this spectrum for each issue. It is politically expedient to match the position that is either furthest toward good or furthest toward evil. Leadership comes from pushing the extremes further outward, prompting other politicians to follow suit.

In the case of Iran's involvement in the Iraqi civil war, hardly anybody occupies the good half of the spectrum, but there is disagreement concerning just how evil Iran really is. In the political sphere, however, the only rational position is to hold that Iran is precisely as evil as Joe Lieberman says it is at the moment, as he is the leader on this issue.

There is no political capital to be gained by claiming that Iran is any less evil than Joe says, regardless of the facts. Further, isolating one's position from the evil extreme is an invitation for criticism of the ideological, emotionally-charged variety that actually affects electoral outcomes.

Electoral politics is not conducive to nuance or equivocation. It requires strong and unconditional positions that need not coincide with reality. In fact, reality-based positions leave politicians vulnerable to negative outcomes, whereas ideological positions are entirely defensible no matter how things turn out.

The more we learn about human psychology, the more we realize that rational argument has a surprisingly limited effect on electoral politics, and the more politicians seek to exploit the established emotional factors that strongly influence voting behavior.

It may be that this is a fatal flaw in the theory behind democratic government. However, it's conceivable that we may soon find an analytical approach to restoring the emphasis on rational debate in our political process.

[baylaw73]

Very, very well said.

[jgronin]

what you say is supported by the fact that our information sources (opinion leaders) who create public opinions of good/ evil are the MSM and subject to the directions of their corporate ownership.

Factually Democracy is a poor choice as a form of government as it is always perverted by moneyed interests.

But it has the appeal of fairness to the disadvantged. The feeling that my opinion counts when in actuality the only opinions that count are those of the manipulators.

In this case AIPAC, the oil industry, the MIC and their wholly owned MSM.

This situation will continue untill America is torn apart by furious citizens much as is happening in Myanmar today. At which point "Good" will be defined as "get rid of these bastards" and Revolution
(uprising) will occur.

we as a country have a great deal of suffering to go through before that time comes and rational debate with an analytical approach will be less effective than plain old rabble rousing since it is always the "rabble" that effects change.

[nellyol'son]

can you please post the senate bill number so i can look up how my state's senator's voted?

new rule: if a post references a recent congressional bill, then that number must be cited within the post. it is difficult to find a senate bill when all i know about it is 'lieberman/kyl'.

[Podewumun]

search HUFFPO for lieberman it was 1st thing this am

[DasBoot]

Here it is:

http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=1&vote=00349#position

[Lemeritus]

Just to make it a little easier - It was Senate Amendment 3017.

Here are the Dems who voted to give our Maniac-in-Chief just that special bit more authority to make mayhem:
Akaka – HI
Baucus – MT
Bayh – IN
Cardin – MD
Carper – DE
Casey – PA
Clinton – NY
Conrad – ND
Dorgan – ND
Durbin – IL
Feinstein – CA
Johnson – SD
Kohl – WI
Landrieu – LA
Lautenberg – NJ
Levin – MI
Menendez – NJ
Mikulski – MD
Murray – WA
Nelson – FL
Pryor – AR
Reed – NV
Rockefeller – WV
Salazar – CO
Schumer – NY
Stabenow – MI
Whitehouse – RI

Here are the Republicans who voted against it:
Hagel – NE
Lugar – IN

[cynara]

I hope your body of evidence makes it to the Senate foreign relations and Intellegence committees, before the EFPs become Iran's version of Iraq's WMDs.

[LightningJoe]

Dissembling and deception are rampant and endemic in this administration. Remember that old joke, "How do you know when a politician is lying?" Well, it's hardly a joke anymore, much less funny -- it's business as usual.

Thanks for coming up with such a comprehensive catalog of the administration's warped reality stance on Iranian involvement in Iraq, and the military's complicity in the effort to deceive.

This all indicates that any claims made by our administration -- about pretty much anything -- should be held to a nearly insurmountable standard of proof, given their demonstrated tendency to create the reality they want us to perceive.

If Secretary Powell's "Stevenson Moment" had received such scrutiny from the press, rather than the uniform cheerleading it garnered, we might never have gone into Iraq to start with.

The press hasn't learned from the experience, however. Petraeus' own "Colin Moment" was lauded far too widely, while those who dissected the event within its political context were called defeatists, etc.

Will we never learn?

[NABNYC]

The whole premise of the U.S. accusations against Iran is absurd. Bush has accused Iran of interfering with Iraq, and providing weapons to Iraqis, of creating fighting and killing in Iraq? Why aren't we all laughing? The fighting, the killing, the weapons in Iraq have all been created by Bush. How dare he accuse someone else of doing what he himself has done?

Iran, just like all the other countries in that region, suffers because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. bombing and assault on other countries and regions in the middle east through Israel. All the refugees in the middle east - millions of them - create intolerable and devastating conditions for all Iraq's neighbors. I guess the neighbors can get involved if they want to. If George Bush wants everyone out of Iraq, I'm all for it - he should lead the parade to the airport and back to the U.S.

Finally, anything that was removed from this resolution to "satisfy" Democrats is just nonsense. If these Democrats had any spine, or any commitment to ending war, they would have voted against this. Remember, Congress has the authority and responsibility to vote for war, and their turning it over to Bush is just the cowards way of letting him do it and then they can come back later and say they were fooled. Actually this vote appears to be a continuation of the Aipac program, used recently in the House, to demand that Congress not take any steps to prevent Cheney/Bush from attacking Iran.

[Cybershaman]

I've been wondering lately if this isn't all a smoke screen to distract us from realizing that all those missing and stolen weapons we have so convieniently provided to the insurgents are beginning to be used against our troops. The Bush League sure wouldn't want the American people to start thinking about THAT, would they?

[KennyS]

Here it is hope that you progressives will not let all those so call members of congress who voted to support that stupid war authorization of the hook, the world is watching

[gillespie]

Apparently this "reporter" is ignorant of the simple truth that Hezbollah is a proxy for Iran. While I don't support an attack upon Iran, this sort of idiocy is a waste of bandwith.

[altohone]

Hezbollah would disagree with you.

[scooperss]

democrats used *I didn't know* so well on the Iraq war that they think they can use it again and still win elections campaigning against the war.