Scooby Doo Ending...It's Iran!...No, wait. It's really...

Who's under the next mask?

Crooks and Liars has thoughts and PowerPoint

Look, I admit, I don't know much about bomb-making. And I don't know much about how factories label bombs. But I do know that in Iran virtually all numbers were in the Farsi-Arabic script. They were not and do not resemble our numbers. Now, I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that the implication that this round captured in the photo is bogus. Color me very skeptical. Any thoughts?

See what happens when you have no credibility on the important things? You end up questioned, more and more.

At Daily Kos, U.S. General Peter Pace has real doubts about what is being claimed:

"We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran. What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se [specifically], knows about this," he said. "It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it's clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

The military doesn't look to be all the confident or passionate about laying blame. Do they have confidence in this White House?

But let us look back at the White House rock solid evidence:

Q What direct evidence do you have that Iranian leaders authorized the smuggling of weapons into Iraq?

MR. SNOW: What I first would do is just point you back to the briefing. What they have are a number of serial numbers, and so on. I'd just take you back to the transcript on that. If you're looking for the granular evidence, that's what they presented.

Q But that wasn't direct evidence linking Iran --

MR. SNOW: Let me put it this way: There's not a whole lot of freelancing in the Iranian government, especially when it comes to something like that.

...Right...so weapons out of Iran...and a butt load of inference...Oh boy.


Also, it gets better:

Yesterday, Kevin Drum speculated that Iran might be providing the SCIRI militia with weaponry. Drum wrote, "In other words, if we had to guess where the bombs were going, we might guess that SCIRI’s militia is getting a share of the action too." There’s no need to guess any longer. CNN’s Michael Ware has confirmed that Iranians have been supplying weapons to SCIRI.

SCIRI is lead by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, someone Bush has bragged about (You know how that goes - Chalabi, Putin, etc.). His compound was raided around Christmas, where 4 Iranians were captured and arrested.

These are our friends? Or enemies? What is going on here?


Let's give the last word to the esteemed Juan Cole, of Informed Comment, who recently was on Countdown, with Keith Olbermann, making him a default Rock Star:

He'll take you through the data, and show you where the numbers just aren't adding up, and take you into the culture and thinking. A good read.