Pentagon carelessness fabricating bogus “evidence” against Iran is really quite stupendous. As I wrote here yesterday, the 81mm mortar shell offered up to the complaisant corporate media as “evidence” Iran is supplying weaponry to the Shi’a of Iraq is an obvious ruse, as the date on the proffered shell does not follow the Muslim calendar and other markings are in English when it only makes sense they would appear in Persian script.

But it gets worse.

As a recent email points out, Iran does not manufacture 81mm mortar shells. According to a report offered by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, connected to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the neocon Brookings Institute, the smallest mortar produced by Iran is the 107mm M-30. This information is included in the JCSS’s “Middle East Military Balance,” updated last February. It can be read in this PDF file on page 15. According to JCSS, “The Middle East Military Balance has been the most authoritative source on Middle Eastern Armies since 1983.” It is quite fortunate for us the hubris-filled neocons care not to double check their engineered lies—erroneously described as a “machining process”—before unleashing them on an unwitting public.

As Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told the Associated Press, the “United States has a long history in fabricating evidence,” an undisputed fact more than underscored by the lead-up to the Iraq invasion when the neocons claimed Iraqi weather balloon trailers doubled as biological weapon labs and clumsily recycled a student’s homework as evidence Saddam was dabbling in weapons of mass destruction.

Considering the shoddiness of the mortar ruse, it makes perfect sense so-called “experts” involved in the scam told “a large gathering of reporters” (more accurately described as script readers and errand boys) “they not be further identified,” lest blame be delivered to their doorstep.

“Why are US officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity when presenting the most detailed evidence yet that Iran is supplying anti-US forces in Iraq with weaponry?” muses Eason Jordan. “After weeks, if not months, of US official planning to present a damning ‘dossier’ of incriminating evidence against Iran, and after this same US administration presented us with lopsided, erroneous information about the capability and evil intentions of the Saddam Hussein regime, the best the US government can give us today is incendiary evidence presented at a Baghdad news conference by three US officials who refuse to be quoted by name?…. The American people deserve straight talk from identified US officials.”

Of course, such “straight talk” will not be forthcoming—not now or after Iran is destroyed, as Iraq was destroyed before it.

Maybe, if we are lucky, at some point in the future, the names of these “experts” will emerge in the course of a new Nuremberg trial.

Addendum

Iran does not manufacture 81mm mortars—but Pakistan does. Compare the photo on this death merchant catalog page with the one offered up as “evidence” against the Iranians. Minus the nosecone and fins at the bottom, it is almost a dead ringer, excuse the metaphor (see enlargement here).

Is it possible the Pentagon neocons, in their zeal to finger the Iranians and thus kick start World War Four, as they fondly call it, are using a Pakistani mortar and attributing it to Iran? Considering the long and sordid history of collaboration between the CIA, Pentagon, and Pakistan’s nefarious ISI, this is likely the case.