...a look at the business end of these things, but I have a feeling that what you're looking at on the diomil site is a conventional shaped charge. This is what the emphasis on a fixed standoff distance suggests to me.

"Political Islam is a dream or a nightmare, but not a sociological reality." - Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

After six full years of lying should we expect anything else?

'real' won't load for me.

via Gareth Porter:

US's smoking gun on Iran misfires
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The first major effort by the administration of US President George W Bush to substantiate its case that the Iranian government has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shi'ites who oppose the occupation undermines the administration's political line by showing that it has been unable to find any real evidence of an Iranian government role.
...
The briefing in Baghdad on Sunday displayed a number of weapons or photographs of weapons said to have been found in Iraq, including what were called "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), which the officials said were smuggled into the country by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. The RPG-7s and 81-millimeter mortar rounds shown to reporters did indeed have markings showing that they had been recently manufactured, and there is no reason to doubt that those weapons were manufactured in Iran.

The argument for Iranian official responsibility assumes that such weapons are so tightly controlled that Shi'ite groups could not purchase them in small numbers on the black market in Iran, Syria or Lebanon. It is well documented, however, that the Shi'ites have resorted to black-market networks to obtain EFPs.
...
An article in Jane's Intelligence Review last month by Michael Knights, chief of analysis for the Olive Group, a private security-consulting firm, reports that the British discovered that there was indeed an organization in Basra engaged in arranging for the purchase and delivery of imported EFPs and that it was composed entirely of police officials, including members of the Police Intelligence Unit, the Internal Affairs Directorate and the Major Crimes Unit. They found that members of the organization followed no specific Shi'ite faction, but included members from all the factions in Basra.
...
he EFPs used against US and British troops in Iraq were the centerpiece of the briefing. But the anonymous US officials did not claim that the finished products have been manufactured in Iran. Instead they referred to machining of EFP "components" - referring to the concave metal lids on the devices - as being done in Iran.
...
It also raises an obvious question: If Iran has the technical ability to supply the complete EFPs, why are only components being smuggled into Iraq?

The absence of shipments of complete EFPs suggests that the components that have been smuggled in have been manufactured in small workshops outside the official system. Knights, the most knowledgeable and politically neutral source on the issue, says these components could have been manufactured by a "small handful of external bomb-makers". He notes that the only source to claim that the Iranian defense industry is the source of the EFP components is the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran.
...
But Knights presents evidence in Jane's Intelligence Review that the Iraqi Shi'ites have indeed manufactured both the components for EFPs and the complete EFPs. He observes that the kind of tools required to fabricate EFPs "can easily be found in Iraqi metalworking shops and garages".

He also notes that some of the EFPs found in Iraq had substituted steel plates for the copper lining found in the externally made lids. Knights calculates that the entire production of EFPs exploded thus far could have been manufactured in one or at most two simple workshops with one or two specialists in each - one in the Baghdad area and one in southern Iraq.

"I'm surprised that they haven't found evidence of making EFPs in Iraq," Knights said in an interview. "That doesn't ring true for me." Knights believes that there was a time when whole EFPs were imported from outside, but that now most if not all are manufactured by Iraqis.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB15Ak03.html

More on the Knights article here, and especially note the Hezbollah references:

The EFP as an Info-Op Prop

Interesting info on the propaganda meme that Iran is supplying a certain type of nasty IED to Iraqi malefactors:
That has been the refrain of the Bush administration and the U.S. command for nearly a year. The Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, Major General Richard Zahner, gave a press conference last September in which he argued that Iran's culpability in the appearance of EFP technology is proven by the fact that the C-4 explosive used in EFPs in Iraq has the same Iranian batch number as the C-4 found on the Hezbollah ship carrying arms to Palestinian militants that was intercepted by the Israelis in 2003.

Zahner's assertion is contradicted, however, by the most in-depth study of the subject so far -- an article by Michael Knights published in Jane's Intelligence Review late last month. Knights, vice-president and head of analysis for the Olive Group, a private security company based in London, has been following the evolution of EFPs in Iraq for nearly three years.

In the article and in an interview with me, Knights suggested that the evidence does not point to Iran as the primary force behind the use of EFPs in Iraq. "There is no need to see an Iranian policy driving it," he told me. Knights said it is far more likely that Hezbollah policy drove the phenomenon. He points out that it was Hezbollah, not Iran, that transferred EFP devices and components to Palestinian militants after the second Intifada began in 2000.

The remarkable coincidence of the same batch number of C-4 appearing in the intercepted Hezbollah ship and in southern Iraq indicates that the Shiite militias have been getting supplies not from the Iranians, but from Hezbollah. (If Iran had deliberately shipped the explosive to southern Iraq last year, the batch number would have been different from a batch that was given to Hezbollah years earlier.)

In the article, Knights suggests that the number of Hezbollah specialists helping Iraqi Shiites learn to use the technology "need not have exceeded one or two bomb-makers," since the numbers of EFPs produced has rarely exceeded 100 per month. That number, he concludes, could have been made in a single modest workshop with one or two technicians.

Knights acknowledges that there is no direct evidence of even such a minimal Hezbollah presence. He infers such a presence from the fact that the technology did not appear in crude experimental form in Shiite areas of southern Iraq during the Sadrist uprising in 2004, but rather as a complex, fully developed technology.

U.S. intelligence has made much of the fact that a Hezbollah manual for making EFPs has been captured in Iraq. Knights notes, however, that the manual was actually found in the hands of Sunni insurgents. Knights says the Sunnis "might also have access to EFP expertise through Palestinian groups." The Sunnis used EFPs on a number of occasions, but most often have relied on the less powerful "shaped charges" that they appear to make themselves.

Regardless of how the technology was initially picked up by Shiite militants, Knights points out that the trend since early 2005 has been toward the emergence of networks of Shiites who make the EFPs themselves, supply them to Shiite militias, and serve as middlemen in importing both devices and components. The network of middlemen, according to Knights, is not aligned with any particular Shiite group and is typified by the one discovered by British forces in Basra in December 2006. It consisted of members of the Basra Police Intelligence Unit, the Internal Affairs Directorate of the police, and the Major Crimes Unit and was drawn from policemen representing every major Shiite faction in Basra.

Knights' research on EFPs illustrates that the Bush administration campaign to blame Iran for the Shiite use of modern weapons is based not on intelligence but rather, once again, on its own faith-based worldview. The syllogism underlying the anti-Iran campaign is: Hezbollah has been helping Shiites. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. Therefore, Iran is arming the Shiites. As Knights cautiously put it in the interview, "It may be that they are taking a data point and blowing it out of proportion."
http://swedemeat.blogspot.com/2007/02/efp-as-info-op-prop.html

As usual, all claims to what is "really" happening in Iraq has more to it than what is shown at a US military briefing, and why people at this late date refuse to first consider the source in forming conclusions is beyond me. Given the myriad of currents eddying through Iraq and the Middle East in general, and the substantial opposition to US policy throughout the region, is it any wonder that a "Hezbollah connection" is more plausible than what is being pushed by the Cheney administration?
BTW, the original Knights article in JIR unfortunately is behind their firewall and obtainable only by subscribers.