More About the Iranian Mortar Shells

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.