and Newsweek has up some background on Junior's current bete noire the Iranian "Quds Force", apparently a branch of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, who had been quite active in both Afghanistan and Iraq, on the side of what are now American allies: the Northern Alliance (Afghanistan) and the PUK (Kurdish Iraq):

The New Enemy?
Bush blames Iran’s Quds Force for a spike in anti-American violence in Iraq. Who are they, and how tight are their ties with Tehran?

By Michael Hirsh, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 3:46 p.m. PT Feb 15, 2007

Feb. 15, 2007 - President Bush officially anointed a new enemy of the United States on Wednesday: the “Quds Force.” After a week in which his administration contradicted itself repeatedly over the threat from Iran, Bush settled on what he said were the known facts. The sophisticated weapons being used against U.S. troops in Iraq “were provided by the Quds Force,” a paramilitary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the president said at a news conference in the East Room. “We know that. And we also know that the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That’s a known. What we don’t know is whether or not head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did.”

Just who are the Quds Force? And how good is the intelligence on them, really? A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that the evidence against the Quds Force is still questionable, and that some of the key Iraqi politicians Washington is relying on most, such as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, have had close relations with the Iranian group. The United States found itself on the same side as the Quds Force after 9/11 in the fight against the Taliban, when Quds supported the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masoud.
...
Even after the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, the Quds Force, or Quds Brigade as it is also called, maintained three major foreign operations: supporting the Kurds in Iraq against Saddam, backing the Muslim Bosnians against the Serbs and working with Masoud and his Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. After Masoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives on Sept. 9., 2001, Quds Force members helped the U.S.-assisted Northern Alliance cross the Kokcha River between Tajikistan and Afghanistan and advance toward Kabul to oust the Taliban, according to Iranian officials.

Perhaps no one has benefited from the Quds Force’s patronage more than the current president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, who is also a close U.S. ally. Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party was Iran’s main ally in northern Iraq during the 1980s. When fighting broke out between rival Kurdish groups in the mid-'90s, the Quds Force fought on Talabani’s side against Massoud Barzani, whose Kurdish party had asked for Saddam Hussein’s help.
...
Today, the broader U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and the Directorate of National Intelligence—which nominally oversees the agency—seems to have reached a consensus that the ordnance on display in the Baghdad slide show was made in Iran and transported over the border somehow by the Quds Force. U.S. intelligence officials also say Quds Force members are suspected of manufacturing EFPs inside Iran.

But the documentation remains scant. And considerable doubts continue to surface about the intelligence presented at the Baghdad slide show, including the fact that the writing on the conventional weapons displayed was in English, not Farsi. U.N. Ambassador Zarif also says that the date markings are American-style—that is, the month comes first. “There is every reason to believe that this evidence is fabricated,” he said. U.S. officials say the weapons were apparently built for the international market. Asked why the writing on the weapons allegedly made in Iran was in English, one U.S. intelligence official responded: “That’s a very good question.” It is one of many questions about the Quds Force that has yet to be answered.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17175607/site/newsweek/page1

"It is one of many questions about the Quds Force that has yet to be answered."

However, Junior continues to burble away uncontrollably, because he knows the source of EFPs, regardless of what the so-called intel is currently showing. Also, for more on the ease which crude EFPs can be manufactured, read this via DefenseTech blog:

Real E.F.P.: Pocket-Sized Tank Killer

The pictures released last week of Iraqi high-tech explosives surprised me. These special 'superbombs' that have caused so many US casualties -- they look like they had been assembled in someone's garage.

These bombs belong to a class known as EFP --'Explosively Formed Projectile' or 'Explosively Formed Penetrator,' depending on who you're talking to. They compress a metal liner into a slug and fire it at the target some distance away.

The picture shows what a real EFP munition looks like. This is M2 Selectable Lightweight Attack Munition (SLAM). It's small enough to put in your pocket and weighs a couple of pounds.

This version has been used by US Special Forces for the last 15 years or so. As GlobalSecurity.org describes it, SLAM is versatile, too:

It will be used to support hit-and-run, ambush, and harassing, and urban warface missions. SLAM will also be employed by Light Combat Engineers and Rangers where missions warrant the use of such a device....SLAM is lightweight, lethal, easily emplaced, and can be carried in the quantity necessary to neutralize a broad range of targets.

Different modes allow SLAM to be triggered by the heat or magnetic signature of a passing vehicle or by a timer -- or it can be set off by a human operator. It can be emplaced in seconds and spits out a lethal slug which can punch through 40mm of steel armor at a range of 25 feet. You can leave it on the ground covered in dirt to attack a vehicle's belly, or conceal it beside a road for side attack.

No doubt the Russians and Chinese have their own versions of SLAM, and these have probably been copied too. So you might expect a rougher, cheaper copy to appear in Iraq if it was supplied from the outside.

But as has been observed here, anyone can make crude and simple EFP munitions in a basic workshop. All you need is a lump of plastic explosive and a piece of copper. Shape the copper into a saucer, put the explosive under it, and you're there. Obviously this will be a lot less efficient, accurate and reliable than something like SLAM (optimal design of the the metal 'lens' is an art requiring a lot of computer power), but you can compensate by making it ten times bigger if you need to.

Maybe the insurgents should be given some credit for being able to build their own gear, or maybe there's more intelligence we don't know. But if EFP mines were being supplied by an outside source, you might expect to see somethng a lot slicker.
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003285.html

TEHRAN Reuters - Iran has arrested some 65 men suspected of being behind a deadly bombing that killed members of the elite Revolutionary Guards in a southeastern border province, the student news agency ISNA said on Friday.

It quoted the local police chief as saying the suspects had clear links to U.S. and British intelligence services. The claim comes at a time when the United States has accused Iranian groups of involvement in the war in Iraq.

A booby-trapped car blew up a bus owned by the Guards on Wednesday, killing at least 11 people in the city of Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan-Baluchestan province which has been the center of low-level unrest over the past months.

The attack was claimed by a shadowy Sunni militant group, Jundallah (God's soldiers), which Iran has said was linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Tehran has blamed Jundallah for past killings in the area bordering Pakistan...

...Iran's semi-official Fars news agency also quoted an unnamed official as saying that "explosives used by the terrorists in Zahedan were American made"...

more at link

I did inhale.

By ANDREW COCKBURN

President Bush has now definitively stated that bombs known as explosively formed penetrators - EFPs, which have proved especially deadly for U.S. troops in Iraq - are made in Iran and exported to Iraq. But in November, U.S. troops raiding a Baghdad machine shop came across a pile of copper disks, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order. This ominous discovery, unreported until now, makes it clear that Iraqi insurgents have no need to rely on Iran as the source of EFPs.

The truth is that EFPs are simple to make for anyone who knows how to do it. Far from a sophisticated assembly operation that might require state supervision, all that is required is one of those disks, some high-powered explosive (which is easy to procure in Iraq) and a container, such as a piece of pipe. I asked a Pentagon analyst specializing in such devices how much each one would cost to make. "Twenty bucks," he answered after a brief calculation. "Thirty at most."

I did inhale.

The homebrew scientists at sciencemadness.com like to make things that go boom.

They enjoy tinkering around with lined shaped charges for fun.

( ... Link 1 ... )

( ... Link 2 ... )

19 pages in that thread alone, be sure not to miss any. They also have some cool movies, such as -

Formation of copper penetrator 1

Formation of copper penetrator 2

Von Mises Stress on twin hemispheres

here

_{"at some point I'm hopeful I'll figure out something to put here"}

opinions and conjectures, any one of which can be true, or partially true, or indeed false, but none of which will get us to the immediate truth of the (narrow) issue at hand: "locally produced" or "imported" explosives. But, in fact does it really matter, as the sheer volume of ordnance, from crudely fabricated to more sophisticated, has been shown to arise from multiple sources, both within and without territorial Iraq, and there is nobody who can prove definitively and unambiguously that any one government beyond the borders of Iraq is directly complicit in what Junior is charging "the deaths of American troops" by deliberately arranging for the importation and use of such explosives (i.e, ETFs) for the express purpose of targeting the US military. As I noted previously, "end-use" is a difficult concept to press an indictment back to "original source"; the salient issue here is the wide-spread proliferation of these devices, and the seeming inability to "neutralise" them.
Why aren't people making a big issue about the most lethal weaponry in use today: the ubiquitous car-bombs, which have accounted for a sizable number of casualties in Iraqi cities, mainly civilians, but also a significant number of Iraqi and US military as well. Again, the sources for explosives used are no doubt manifold, I would guess mainly obtained internally, but does it matter where the raw material originates or how it is fabricated? Of course not, because the important point is that a car-bomb is easy to assemble, and its effects are devastating, purely on a "cost-benefit" basis, and virtually impossible to prevent, as one is dealing with both a "remote-control" detonation, and the "suicide bomber", a more "intelligent" fuse, as it were. The anti-occupation forces will always have the advantage here, and arguing ad nauseam about the minutiae of "fine-machinery", or "copper v. bronze casting", whatever, simply fades into "forest for the trees" sort of polemics, and frankly not very productive.