At a press conference yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman seemed to contradict SecState Hillary Clinton’s very public, and widely reported, accusation that Russia was sending new attack helicopters to Syria (Via Lucy Kaminov):
Q: Just one more quick follow-up. Secretary of State Clinton said just a short time ago that Russia is now supplying attack helicopters to the Syrians, and warns of a serious escalation in the fighting there. Can you provide any details as to what kind of helicopters, when were they delivered, how are they being delivered?
CAPT. KIRBY: I am not seeing reporting that indicates the — that the Russians are providing attack helicopters to the Syrians. I’ve just not seen that.
What I can tell you is that we have been in consultations with our Russian partners for some time now about the way forward in Syria and about soliciting their support for the kinds of international and economic pressure that we believe needs to continue to be applied against the Assad regime. But I have not seen reports about specific helicopter airframes being provided to Syria.
Q: Well, what have you seen in regard to attack helicopters?
CAPT. KIRBY: Well, we do –
Q: If the State Department is seeing it, clearly, you’ve seen it, right?
CAPT. KIRBY: We know that — we know that the Assad regime is using helicopter gunships against their own people. I mean, I — we do know that. I don’t have, you know, the blow-by-blow of exactly what day and when and what type of aircraft they’re using. Frankly, the type of airframe is immaterial. That they are using helicopter gunships against their own people is intolerable, unacceptable and just further evidence of the degree to which they’re willing to kill their own people for twisted ends.
Q: And — sorry — the claim that Russia is supplying these helicopters, that would be immaterial?
CAPT. KIRBY: I didn’t say that, Mick. I said I haven’t seen reporting that indicates the Russians are supplying helicopters.
The Russian Foreign Minister has denied Clinton’s claim and the AFP notes that “The State Department has declined to specify Clinton’s source for the charges” even as Clinton ups the ante further by demanding that Russia “cut these military ties completely and…suspend all further support and deliveries”. At the same time, reports from members of the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, and other activists say that U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Quatar are funnelling new arms to the Syrian rebels via NATO member Turkey.
So, even if Clinton has a source for her accusation that the DoD hasn’t seen, it still amounts to rank hypocrisy to call on Russia to stop what U.S. allies are obviously doing with full U.S. knowledge: arming their preferred side in the Syrian civil war. However, if – as may be the case – Clinton just made up the accusation, then we’re in very dangerous territory where a U.S. Secretary of State who has already said she will not serve a second term is poking a very large bear with a sharp stick over a civil war that could end up with the superpowers glaring at each other over the heads of their proxies. Questions must now be asked of Clinton – she needs to be clear about the sourcing of her accusation, or apologize.
When Bush wanted to get his war on with Iran, a series of high level responses were issued. The most pertinent to this case was that of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace. Pace undercut Bush’s claim that the Quds Force was supplying weapons to the Iraqi Shias. He said, about five time, that there was no truth to this. Bush could not do his war for this and other reasons.
I could be wrong but this might be a repetition of the military saving us from a stupid and harmful war.
Thanks for this
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Qods force was running weapons down the line (and providing training inside Iran). That was pretty well established. What was not established was how far up the chain of command the authority for that set of actions went (i.e., did the Rahbar “know” or was this something that the IRGC did on its own initiative).
When the opposition can’t model your decision making process effectively, plausible deniability works a lot better. Of course, when you don’t know how gullible the other side is, there can be a pretty significant plausibility mismatch. All of which would explain why some very high level Iranian assets in Iraq got to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of JSOC’s attentions and why they came close to eating ordnance inside Iran.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Quds also were paid to work closely with the cia in the early days of Afghan 2.0 then were sent away when rummies army finally got there.
Then at the same time dod doesn’t want to be shown up by state. It’s just more misdirection by both parties involved.
“That was pretty well,established”, JPD, you should explain more. It was primarily established by interrogations in which MeK members acted as translators and perhaps even interogaters and the key weapon presence which was meant to prove Iranian involvement was entirely hyped. At no point was a shipment of supposedly signature EFPs ever intercepted coming across the border and the proof they were signature came down to machining marks on the liners because supposedly the Iraqis didn’t have the equipment to do that particular process (even as Iraq was simultaneously touting its capacity for just such processes at industrial trade fairs worldwide).
Pace said, twice, that the infamous Baghdad Briefing led anonymously by Dan Senor didn’t prove either that the EFPs were from Iran or that the Iranian government had ordered them made for Iraqi militias. I remember it well – it’s one of my small claims to fame that I was the one who spotted his first denial in an obscure enlglish-language newspaper website from his Indonesia visit and my post was picked up by some big blogs so that the next day the AP asked him again and he said it all again. Then the head of Centcom, Adm. Fallon, agreed and any chance of using the Baghdad Briefing as a causus belli was dead in the water.
Right on the chain of command. Bush claimed that high level Iranian government officials were behind the sales. Voice of America asked Pace about it i Canberra and he said:
February 12: Canberra, Australia. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, denies that there is a demonstrated link between weapons found in Iraq and the Iranian government. “We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran. What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se [specifically], knows about this.” (Voice of America) See timeline here – http://tinyurl.com/cyq3uoe
The current Army official is not at Pace’s level but it’s the same type of correction, maybe. It should shut Clinton down for a bit.
HRC is moving into a special ranking for incompetence shilling for war formerly occupied exclusively by Condoleezza Rice. Clinton needs to do one of her “listening tours” again.
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New York Times today:
In other words she embellished, made shit up, lied, so as to poke the Russian bear – there are no new chopper sales, these are birds sold a decade ago – and now the administration is frantically spinning to cover that fact up a bit. Crazy.
…but that doesn’t mean their collective understanding is correct. EFPs as a phenomenon appeared pretty suddenly in a fully formed technological system – right from the beginning we saw multiple warhead arrays with passive IR sensor initiation with exactly the same manufacturing and emplacement signature as had been previously seen fielded by Hez in south Lebanon (this was, BTW, validated by folks from non-US [and non-IDF] services who looked at these things). Tellingly, some time later, incremental improvements which were first seen in the field in Iraq made their way back to south Lebanon.
This fully formed technological system first appeared in early 2005 linked to a network headed by a known Badr personage known to have been a Qods Force member. All throughout the subsequent run it was associated with Shia groups. Yeah, there was a theoretical technical capability to produce these things within Iraq, but that capability was Sunni aligned. The industrial facilities and the key personalities involved with this in Saddam’s old infrastructure were predominantly Sunni. They found lots of evidence of weapon assembly inside Iraq and lots of evidence for the production of knock-offs (platter charges, etc.) but nothing that was good indicator of indigenous production of high-end EFPs. There’s a decent stuff indicating various folks were trying to make them but they don’t appear to have been too successful (the tooling associated with producing these things is pretty significant – they’re not, contrary to the blogosphere’s protestations, something that gets turned out in any village metal shop – though that metal shop could produce something that looks a lot like them to the untrained eye). If this was indigenous production, we would have expected it to not spring forth with the signature of Hez and we would have expected it to have an establishment phase and we would expect it to be Sunni aligned. None of those things happened.
It’s also worth noting that EFPs were only the most notorious part of a complex of logistical inputs that were Iranian sourced, including mortar shells, MANPADs, 240 mm rockets, RPGs, explosives, etc. Tellingly, all of those things eventually did decrease in supply as increased pressure was put on the Iranians over the issue (both by the Americans and GOI).
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
The first “fully formed technological system” of EFP design appeared in Ireland in the 90s. It was given to the IRA in a botched attempt at a sting operation, as revealed by the Independent in 2005. No-one has ever suggested that the IRA was supplied by Iran and no-one seems to have a problem with the idea that the IRA made it’s EFP’s locally and without sophisticated means of production. The IRA promptly sold or gave beam-triggered EFP designs to FARC, ETA and Hezboullah. The indies link is dead but here’s a reprint of that piece. This entirely explains the lack of ramp-up, by Occam’s Razor, just as it does in other places now that got designs from Iraqi insurgents. As Robert Baer noted in 2007, “Iraqis — both Shi’a and Sunni — fought with Hizballah in southern Lebanon in its 18-year war against Israel, picking up battlefield experience we’re now seeing in Iraq, including knowledge of explosive-formed projectiles, EFP’s.”
Just because Western intelligence believes something does not make it true, especially if we’re talking about a period when stovepiping was a common problem. Unless you did the analysis yourself, you’re still relying on other people telling you something is a fact when it may not be and the determination that it’s a fact may have been done by a very limited number of people on an agenda (Kevin Barry), looking at a limited data set.
I’m very aware that good EFPs need some sophisticated tooling. Iraq’s govt. was touting that tooling at international trade fairs in 2006 while companies in Indonesia, Australia and South Africa were boasting of their sales to Iraq of those tools – in the latter two cases for use in Basra’s oil industry. Again, Occam’s Razor applies. The evolving hype on EFPs over the period was ridiculous, moving rapidly from “only Iran makes EFP’s” to “Iran makes them and they are assembled in Iraq” to “Iraqis make their own but the ones made in Iran work better” as outside experts contradicted each position. At one point the official line was even that Iraqis made their own poured EFP liners “using brass and copper melted on stoves” – despite the simple fact that no stove known burns hot enough to melt brass or copper, which require temps in excess of 1700-1900 farenheit when stoves manage 900F tops. It was stovepiping for an uncritical media, pure and simple.
lastly, I’m talking about EFPs here. I’m aware that other ordnance as you describe it was also found in Iraqi insurgent stockpiles. Like EFPs though, no shipment was ever seized coming across the border despite a British battalion spending months on end on patrol in the desert trying to find such shipments. Iran has a national arms website that sells across the globe, and any of those weapons could then have been resold into Iraq on the massive regional arms black market. That might explain why they still had Iranian markings on them, since even the perfidious Persians might be expected to be bright enough to not openly mark weapons being used in covert shipments for the express purpose of killing Americans.
I remember the British coverage. Whoever fed them the story did not understand the difference between the devices fielded by Hezbullah and seen in Iraq and what the IRA fielded. Iraqi devices used a passive IR sensor – IRA devices relied on an active link between an IR emitter and a much less sensitive receiver. Take a close look at the story – there’s no specific mention of IRA use of explosively forged projectiles – to the best of my knowledge they always used this system with blast devices, never having need to crack something hard enough to require something so exotic as an EFP warhead. The only similarity here is that both devices make use of IR wavelengths, but they do so in very different ways and actually work quite differently.
You might also want to check your contention that the Iraqis couldn’t have melted their own metals. It’s quite possible – you simply don’t do it on a stovetop, you do it with a homebuilt smelting furnace. I know guys who do it for fun to sandcast bodies for woodworking planes. I’m told the parts are about a hundred bucks or so. You’ll also find when you look into it that the EFPs that they use in the oil industry use similar physical principles in their function but are actually made of different materials and have manufacturing trajectories that are different in one or two key ways that have a big impact on their function as anti-armour warheads.
As to them never bouncing an Iranian shipment, I don’t recall that this was ever covered in the press, but I’d have to then ask, well how are arms of known Iranian manufacture ending up in Iraq in such significant quantities? This was a very significant quantity of stuff – the JAM folks spent the better part of two years pounding the crap out of the Green Zone with 240 mm rockets pretty much at will.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
State department acknowledges Damascus already owned attack helicopters, cited by Hillary Clinton as escalating violence
AP, June 15
Washington – The US state department has acknowledged that Russian helicopters it claimed had been sent recently to the Syrian regime were, in fact, refurbished ones already owned by Damascus.
Secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, claimed on Tuesday that “the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria”.
The state department admitted details had been omitted from Clinton’s speech in which she accused Russia of escalating the violent situation in Syria. But spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: “Whether they are new or they are refurbished, the concern remains that they will be used for the exact same purpose that the current helicopters in Syria are being used, and that is to kill civilians.
“These are helicopters that have been out of the fight for some six months or longer. They are freshly refurbished. The question is simply what one expects them to be used for when one sees what the current fleet is doing. Every helicopter that is flying and working is attacking a new civilian location so the concern is when you add three more freshly refurbished helicopters to the fight, that is three more that can be used to kill civilians.”
Clinton’s accusation prompted a stern Russian denial and countercharges of hypocrisy against the US for selling military equipment, including jet engines and patrol boats, to Bahrain despite civil strife in the Arab state.
(which is my full extent of tennis lingo).
Either Clinton spoke out of ignorance, in which case this is a huge lapse in performance or she is inciting war, having known before she spoke that the copters were from longstanding Russian military aid/commerce with its ally Syria.
In either case, she is not fit to be Secretary of State for the United States of America.
Obama should fire here.
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“It’s quite possible – you simply don’t do it on a stovetop, you do it with a homebuilt smelting furnace.”
I know that. My point is that at one time it was official US intel wisdom that it was being done on stoves.
This is how easy it is to buy weapons from Iran.
The ME black market is worth an estimated $30 billion annually and is traded over smuggling routes that have been around since Silk Road days. The US itself lost over 190,000 small arms in Iraq and another 80,000 in Afghanistan – many have turned up in the hands of the likes of the PKK in Turkey. Over 6,000 US weapons are seized in Latin American nations every year, after having been “re-directed” to criminals and militants. Why is it so difficult for you to apply Occam’s Razor to all this and see that there’s no more actual proof that Iran’s leadership is complicit than there is of the US being so? Simple criminal private entrepreneurship – including by officers in militaries, google Joey Lavonda Selph, Petraeus’ aide – is often sufficient explanation.
…Occam’s razor to me. Which is more likely: that CJTF Intel – which is a several thousand people, and had this as one of their top four or five targets for a couple of years – had no one who realized that one doesn’t boil up a pot of copper on the old stovetop, or somewhere in the PAFO/reporting/editing chain someone substituted “stove” for “furnace”. I’m going to go with the latter.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
…in this is the Occam’s razor hypothesis. You can claim otherwise until the cows come home, but Iranian involvement on EFPs via the mechanism of Hezbollah and technology sharing very neatly fits all of the available evidence. Sorry, but everyone who isn’t getting their “evidence” from blog commentary agrees on this – including the guy who was the prime mover source mis-cited as evidence for Iranian non-involvement in the first place.
When you’re trying to sell the notion that the IRA is the source of TTPs and technology for Hezbollah, as opposed to them cross-fertilizing with their long-term patron Iran, via the mechanism of Qods Force (which was where Imad spent much of his very accomplished adult life) – you’re not selling the Occam’s Razor hypothesis, sorry. PIRA in Piranshahr doesn’t really fly.
Similarly, the notion that the Iranians might realize when hundreds of tons of recent-manufacture DIOMIL produced material end up in Iraq and they get serially pressured on it by the US and GOI is the Occam’s Razor hypothesis. Iran doesn’t lose this much current production run material to these specific players over this long a period as an accident. The only ambiguity would be who authorized the “loss”. The highest Iranian authorities were repeatedly made aware of the scale of the issue and it ran afterwards for an extended period – that means either the folks at the top didn’t want to stop it or couldn’t stop it. Given the specific nature of Iranian power on this set of issues, this means that the Rahbar (it does mean “Supreme Leader” [roughly], after all) at a minimum didn’t put his foot down – because he didn’t want to, because he didn’t want to expend the political capital required, or because he didn’t have enough political capital to do so if he really wanted to. Only the first two of these are very likely.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs