[Grovenet] A Keystone Kops comedy ? ? ? ?

[allnutt]

I'm picking up on your tag line about being mad as hell here.....
You may find some comfort in the Dixie Chicks getting the Grammy award for their comeback song "Not Ready to Make Nice".   One of the lyrics is 'I'm still mad as hell and I don't have time to go round and round and round."
They were mad as hell back at the very beginning of the war, which as we now know was the proper thing to be in 2003.  Plus it is a good album.  If you want to pick it up or down load it from iTunes it is a fun song to play loud.

As to the high tech weapons being sold '03-'04 to fight drug smugglers winding up arming insurgents in Iraq in '07 it is maddening to find yet another instance of deadly devices generating profits and then winding up hurting unintended victims.  Austria makes a big lot of money but the guns wind up going from Iran to Iraq.  
Super deadly IEDs circumstantially indicate that Iran has a hand in the violence in Iraq but we decimated one or more sections of our CIA presence in Iran when Valerie Plame was outed (accidentally of course!) so we don't have as many resources to know how far up the chain of command in Iran the plot goes.  And the powers at the top are now comfortable openly disagreeing with Bush about what the circumstantial evidence says about the Iranian government.
I take that as a hopeful sign even if the sequence of events can be viewed as a keystone kop movie.

But overall I'm not sure that people are being truthful when they say it may be disturbing that arms are freely traded between nations.  Land mines have been very profitable for companies here in the US that make them and they have crossed many borders over the years when we sell them to country A and they wind up being used in country B. Countless arms and ammunition that was transferred from our troops in Afghanistan to trainees in Iraq have gone missing as well, but it hasn't been widely reported by our administration.  Why in the world would be surprised that weapons profitably made in Austria and sold to Iran are now showing up in Iraq?  Who knows where the literal tons of explosives are that were taken right under our noses when we failed to guard the ammunition sites in the early part of the Iraq invasion?  Would Bush be surprised to learn that some of that has gone to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Syria, or even (shock!) Iran and then perhaps back into Iraq again?  

He would claim that it is enough reason to invade Iran but in reality it was merely the natural flow of ammunition between groups that operate on the free trade of weapons and money theory.  (Part of the NAFTA, CAFTA, SHAFT YA! philosophy.)  It isn't surprising and if Bush is disturbed or shocked or surprised by any of it, it just means he is more of an idiot than he initially appears to be.

Katie

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob Browning 
  To: Grovenet 
  Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 12:44 PM
  Subject: [Grovenet] A Keystone Kops comedy ? ? ? ?


  The following would almost look like a Keystone Kops comedy if it weren't for the thousands of American dead and the tens of thousands of others killed and for the hundreds of thousands injured and maimed for life!!

  bob "I'm really starting to get mad as hell!!" browning


    Pace questions whether Iran arming Iraq 
    By CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 24 minutes ago 

    The top U.S. military officer said Tuesday the discovery that roadside bombs in Iraq contained material made in Iran does not necessarily mean the Iranian government was involved in supplying insurgents.

    The comments by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called into question assertions by three senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad on Sunday who said the highest levels of Iranian government were responsible for arming Shiite militants in Iraq with the bombs, blamed for the deaths of more than 170 troops in the U.S.-led coalition.

    White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday he was confident the weaponry was coming with the approval of the Iranian government.

    Pace told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, that U.S. forces hunting militant networks in Iraq that produced roadside bombs had arrested Iranians and some of the materials used in the devices were made in Iran.

    "That does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this," Pace said. "What it does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers."

    On Monday, Pace said he had no firm knowledge that the Iranian government had sanctioned the arming of the insurgents.

    "It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it's clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit," Pace told the Voice of America.

    Iran denied it gave sophisticated weapons to militants to attack U.S. forces.

    "Such accusations cannot be relied upon or be presented as evidence. The United States has a long history in fabricating evidence. Such charges are unacceptable," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran.

    In Washington, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Tuesday that he could not explain the apparent contradiction and referred questions to Pace's office and to American forces in Baghdad.

    A military official on Pace's staff said the general stands by his comments. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

    Asked if Pace had vetted the information that went into Sunday's briefing, the official said Pace was aware of what was going to be presented in Baghdad, but that the comment about involvement at the highest levels of Iranian government was not included in the material Pace was given.

    The Joint Chiefs chairman is the senior military adviser to the president, but he commands no troops and is not in the chain of command that runs from the president to the secretary of defense to commanders in the field.

    The U.S. accusations against Iran have also drawn in an Austrian arms company.

    Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Tuesday that American troops have recovered more than 100 "Steyr .50 HS" rifles in Iraq, part of an Austrian consignment of 800 such weapons delivered to Iran over American protests that they could be given to insurgents.

    The Austrian government approved the sale of the rifles, made by precision weapons maker Steyr Mannlicher GmbH, after it concluded in 2004 that they would be used to fight narcotics smugglers.

    "We checked the proposal very thoroughly," Austrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Astrid Harz said, noting that the situation in Iraq and the region in 2003-2004 was very different than it is now.

    "What happened to the weapons then is the responsibility of the Iranians," Harz said. 

    Franz Holzschuh, Steyr's CEO, said the company had not officially been contacted by anyone to verify the serial numbers on the rifles. He said there was a possibility the weapons were reproductions and that there were "thousands" of these in circulation. 

    "Fact is, we never delivered to Iraq," he said. 

    U.S. officials could not confirm the validity of the report, said William Wanlund, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria. 

    "Obviously, if the reports are true, it would be profoundly disturbing," he said. 

    ___ 

    Associated Press writers Pauline Jelinek in Washington, Raphael G. Satter in London and Veronika Oleksyn in Vienna, Austria, contributed to this report.

    Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 





------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  GroveNet mailing list
  GroveNet at rdrop.com
  http://www.rdrop.com/mailman/listinfo/grovenet