The article pointing out that the shell couldn't be an Iranian dud based that theory on the fact that Iran didn't have the capability to manufacture such shells. However, another blogger (can't remember who) noticed that the specs on the shell matched an American munition. We sold weapons to the Iranians during the Iran-Contra affair. Now, I have no idea what kind of weapons we sold them. Is it possible that this shell was an American munition, sold to the Iranians, and then used against Iraq?

Josh,

American artillery uses 155-mm shells; I think some other designs use 152-mm. Since all they got was fragments, I don't know how confidently it can be stated that this shell was 155-mm, not 152-mm. Unless I see a direct quote from a munitions expert that has studied the fragments in question, I'd be skeptical either way--this seems like an assumption that could slide into the analysis far too easily by accident.

The shell was designed with an internal membrane that would rupture when the shell was fired. Now, I can't think of any type of munition that would require this design except a binary chemical agent. Are you seriously suggesting that the U.S. would have sold artillery shells to Iran in the mid-'80s that were explicitly designed as carriers for sophisticated chemical weapons?

> Are you seriously suggesting that the U.S. would have sold artillery shells to Iran in the mid-'80s that were explicitly designed as carriers for sophisticated chemical weapons?

I'm seriously ignorant about the specifications for military weapons. I really have no idea how dangerous this particular weapon is. Is it mainly a battlefield weapon?

As for whether the leaders would do this? I kinda figure if they're willing to sell weapons to both sides in a war, well, who knows what their principles are.

Josh Yelon (8:47am),

Your reasoning comes close to supposing a conspiracy theory as the explanation of first resort. All American leaders have been Devils, so who knows what they would have done or what their principals would have been.

Which is fine. Except that I can see you a conspiracy and raise you one, and I haven't even had my morning java. And everyone on my Left and on my Right can find Conspiracies to suit their fancies, too. So where does that leave informed analysis?

See Dan's reference to Blaster's Blog for some analysis and discussion on the reality and implications of the binary sarin IED shell.

Kimmitt said the round, designed to mix the sarin in flight, belonged to a class of ordnance that the ousted government of Saddam claimed to have destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war.

152mm is a Soviet calibre of shell. Other armies may use it as well.

This makes sense, given that most of Iraq's military hardware is Soviet. The Soviets also had very advanced chemical weapons delivery systems, as this was a significant part of their military doctrine. Iraq is known to have used Soviet chemical shells in a number of its chemical attacks.

On other matters, I agree that the combination of ignorance and a "conspiracy theory of first resort" is both disturbing and revealing.

AJL (2:47pm),

The Kimmitt-transcript question would seem to be becoming more important over time. I suspect clarifications will be forthcoming in terms of what he said, and more than that, what he meant (e.g. he may have misspoken on the crucial mix-before-firing vs. mix-in-flight issue).

Questions:

--Kimmitt said the IED detonated as soldiers were preparing to disarm it. Timer or remote control I guess. Was the HE that blew up the firing charge that expels the shell from the gun muzzle, or the small charge that disperses the sarin at the destination?

--What was left to analyze? A bunch of dispersed fragments or a largely-intact hunk of metal? Enough to distinguish 152mm diameter from 155mm? Enough to see distinguishing marks, read serial and lot numbers? The readers of Tim Blair's blog were able to identify an explosion in a Baghdad market in March/April 2003 as coming from an AAMRAAM missile, based on the writing on fragments that Robert Fisk (!) reported.

--The claim that you, me, jihadis, and UNSCOM can't readily distinguish GB shells from HE shells is different from the claim that they are indistinguishable. This latter is what I've read in the press, but it makes no sense to me. Gun crews and ammo depot warehousemen have to be able to identify shells for this chemical arms program to have any potential effectiveness. For example, how do you adjust firing for wind conditions, if you don't know if the shell in the gun is chemical or HE? It seems more likely to me that Iraqi Army Artillery sergeants, etc. could ID shells by a non-obvious means (two paint stripes instead of one, odd-numbered lot, etc.). If the jihadis are paying attention, they will now know to get some remedial education on this subject.

> Your reasoning comes close to supposing a conspiracy theory as the explanation of first resort.

I wasn't "reasoning" anything, I was asking a simple question: did we or did we not sell this type of shell to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair? It seemed like the sort of thing that Dan would know right off the top of his head, that's why I was asking him.

Or did the leaders never come clean about what they sold back then? I was not into politics at the time, so I don't remember whether or not they ever came clean.

I've also heard repeated assertions around here that the insurgency is being supplied by Iran. Which makes it an obvious question: are any of these weapons coming from Iran?

In other news, here's a bizarre turn of events

Large arty rounds are not like bullets where the propulsive charge and the projectile are packaged together in a shell. Rather, the propulsive charge is a separate package, often a bag of powder. The device in question sounds like it was a binary projectile of mix-in-flight type. It would have only a small dispersal charge of HE; too big a charge would decompose the chem agent rendering it mostly ineffective.

Josh Yelon:

Based on my abeit limited knowledge of what occurred in Iran-Contra, I thought that all of the weaponry that the US sold Iran was the conventional variety. Certainly I would have questions about charges that the US would sell Iran extremely advanced (for the Iranians) chemical munitions if this shell is supposed to be the only evidence of such weaponry. I also imagine that there are ways of tracing the shell back to who manufactured it to see where it was made, which would probably be the clearest way to ID it.

I've also heard repeated assertions around here that the insurgency is being supplied by Iran. Which makes it an obvious question: are any of these weapons coming from Iran?

Not to my knowledge, though some of Sadr's cannon fodder apparently is - Baseejis (Iran's volunteer brownshirt corps) have turned up dead in Karbala according to various reports. Iran has reportedly provided Sadr with $80,000,000 of play money for him to stir up trouble, which Sadr can then use to purchase weapons as he and his various Mahdi Army commanders (including Imad Mugniyeh?) deem fit. No doubt there are interlocking Iranian intel directorates managing the finances, given the pseudo-Stalinist nature of the mad mullahs' regime. However, Iraq is currently awash with weapons caches left over from the old Iraqi military depots, so most of the Mahdi Army members are likely simply using the Iranian cash to buy weapons in-country. Also, wouldn't anything the Mahdi Army was supplied by Iran pretty much be the same Soviet stuff that is currently readily-available in Iraq?

As far as Chalabi getting his ass raided, it isn't exactly an arrest but I'll be more than happy to take it for whatever it's worth. He called the tune and now it's time to pay the piper.

Josh Yelon (4:45pm) wrote:

I was asking a simple question: did we or did we not sell this type of shell to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair?

President Nixon disavowed first use of chemical weapons in November, 1969.

The Iran-Iraq war ran 1980-88.

It's hard for me to imagine Reagan's administration--freelance lawbreakers included--doing a cost/benefit analysis and seeing any way that the upside of secretly shipping US binary sarin shells to Iran (or Iraq) could beat the multiple and obvious downsides. I know of no suggestions that this took place.

Forgive me if your simple question seemed more of a leading question. But in finding the cites for this post, I note that it reflects a charge that's appeared, without any corroboration, in a number of the-usual-suspect places.

But the blessing and the curse of conspiracies is that any plausible theory might be true, and most can be adjusted to fit with seemingly-discordant facts as they become known. And substantiating evidence is nice, but not required.

By the way, it seems that mix-before-firing binary shells are one-chambered; only mix-during-flight shells have two. The Agonist has descriptions of Iraqi binary sarin shells here and here. The US binary mix-in-flight 155mm round was called M687. At one of The Agonist's links, a poster claims that all M687s were destroyed by 1997, and that the stockpile was entirely accounted for by an independent auditor. FWIW.

Pardon my ignorance - what's this about helium?

HE = high explosive

thanks.

****Phil Carter over at Intel Dump notes that US troops are being diverted away from South Korea to Iraq. He sees this as a symptom of troop stretch, a position that I readily concur with.****

Uhhh....my guess is it's time for someone else's spanking, if you know what I mean. I don't want to spell it out, but I predicted this spanking to take place before the end of the year. I'm syriaous....

Jeff,

Lol--I'd be more inclined to guess east, not west, and the beginning of next year, not sometime this year. I think the plans for South Korea have been for a general drawdown anyway, though. Should everything go seriously to the bad on the Korean peninsula, the South Korean Army can handle land operations perfectly well without us. We'd still provide significant naval/air support, but I doubt we'd be needed much dirtside.

He = Helium
HE = high explosive

Some of yesterday's comments concerned the significance of the binary sarin shell used as an IED in Baghdad earlier this week. To follow up, Scott Ritter (!) has written an article with important new facts.

The link to the Christian Science Monitor piece (and relevant analysis) is at Blaster's Blog.

According to Darwish's UnHoly Babylon, the 155 mm
shell used in the bombing, were sold variously by
Cardoen's Chile, S. Africa's Armscor, Dutch and
other enterprises.

As to the National Guard/Vinnell connection; it doesn't surprise me , considering the fact that
the first Saudi insurrection; the taking of the
Mecca mosque; was directed by Fmr Natl. Guardsmen
Utaibi. (The Utaibi clan, are prominent characters
in Christopher Reich's recent prescient novel.

I agree that Syria is in for it. The words of the sanctions executive order read like the indictment of Iraq - WMD, support for terrorists, the whole deal.

The Japanese and everyone else seem TOTALLY UNAWARE that Japan already had a link with the Islamic terrorist "Roubaix Gang", as well as Al Qaeda, long before Lionel Dumont ever travelled to Japan.

In the 1990’s a Japanese convert to Islam named Masumi Miyake married the Algerian Hamid Aich, bin Laden's chief financial officer in Europe. Aich had also fought in Bosnia.

It was in Bosnia that Dumont’s friend Christophe Caze, a co-founder of the Roubaix cell, fought alongside another Algerian named Fateh Kamel. At Caze's death French police discovered Kamel’s phone number in his possession and traced Kamel to Montreal. French authorities maintain that Kamel was a leader of the Roubaix, among other cells in Canada, France, Bosnia, Italy and Istanbul.

Hamid Aich’s roomate in Montreal, Ahmed Ressam, was a close friend of Fateh Kamel - indeed Kamel later admitted as much at his French trial. On the same day that Ressam was convicted in L.A. for the his "Millenium Bomb Plot", he also was convicted in absentia and sentenced to five years in prison in France for his involvement in the Roubaix gang.

Hamid Aich had also shared an apartment in Vancouver with Abdelmajid Dahoumane, a co-conspirator with Ressam in the LAX plot.

From Vancouver Aich and Miyake travelled to Dublin Ireland. There he fell in with an Islamic charity that American prosecutors have linked to the embassy bombings in Africa and to the purchase of weapons from Somalia. Irish police later established that the charity's director received calls from bin Laden's satellite telephone.

Upon giving birth to a daughter in Dublin, Aich and Miyake were granted Irish citizenship. Although they lived off of a generous state pension Aich vanished after Dublin police bungled his arrest (to the chagrin of US authorities). He is still at large, and among the world’s most wanted terrorists.

Miyake and their child fled to Japan, but it's anyone's guess where they now reside. There is very little about her on the web. The Japanese media may be clueless but hopefully Interpol has the situation in hand (?).

http://www.intellnet.org/news/2001/11/09/8113-1.html

Timothy O'Connor