Muddying the Evidence

The military lays out the parts captured that were to be used as EFPs and the NYTimes reporter decides that the every day parts in the pile "confuses" him as to the origin of the other parts. What an idiot.

In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.

Piles of copper liners, which the military says come from Iran for use in bombs, and which collapse into armor-piercing projectiles upon explosion.

Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.

“I’ve lost good friends to these E.F.P.’s,” said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. “And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.”

The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.

But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.

The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, “Leave your number and we will call you back.”

Let's see, if the box contains C-4 and specifically machined copper parts, then the common elements are confusing, because they can be gotten elsewhere. What is this guy thinking? Does he really expect that Iran would be the sole source provider of all the parts of the bombs? Or would it make more sense to send the small parts that can't be commonly purchased or made to minimize what needs to be smuggled across the border.

Does this reporter have a reason for making this crap up? I don't know, but if he's confused by simple parts being among those specifically manufactured for EFPs, then he may want to find a job where actually using your mind isn't a requirement. Though at this point, working at the NYTimes appears to be on that list.